Caring passionately about something isn't against nature, and it isn't against human nature. It's what we're here to do.

I would like to live. . . open to time and death painlessly, noticing everything, remembering nothing, choosing the given with a fierce and pointed will.

No one can help you if you're stuck in a work. Only you can figure a way out, because only you can see the work's possibilities.

Push it. examine all things intensely and relentlessly.

There is always the temptation in life to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for years on end. It is all so self conscience, so apparently moral...But I won't have it. The world is wilder than that in all directions, more dangerous...more extravagant and bright. We are...raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain, or Lazarus.

The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.

It is the fixed that horrifies us, the fixed that assails us with the tremendous force of mindlessness. The fixed is a Mason jar,and we can't beat it open. ...The fixed is a world without fire--dead flint, dead tinder, and nowhere a spark. It is motion without direction, force without power, the aimless procession of caterpillars round the rim of a vase, and I hate it because at any moment I myself might step to that charmed and glistening thread.