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

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.

We are here to abet creation and to witness to it, to notice each other's beautiful face and complex nature so that creation need not play to an empty house.

We teach our children one thing only, as we were taught: to wake up. We teach our children to look alive there, to join by words and activities the life of human culture on the planet

It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance.

The more you read, the more you will write. The better the stuff you read, the better the stuff you will write.

Last forever!' Who hasn't prayed that prayer? You were lucky to get it in the first place. The present is a freely given canvas. That it is constantly being ripped apart and washed downstream goes without saying.