if you stay still, earth buries you, ready or not.

Painters work from the ground up. The latest version of a painting overlays earlier versions, and obliterates them. Writers, on the other hand, work from left to right. The discardable chapters are on the left.

It has always been a happy thought to me that the creek runs on all night, new every minute, whether I wish it or know it or care, as a closed book on a shelf continues to whisper to itself its own inexhaustible tale.

You can serve or you can sing, and wreck your heart in prayer, working the world's hard work.

Books swept me away, this way and that, one after the other; I made endless vows according to their lights for I believed them.

Private life, book life, took place where words met imagination without passing through the world.

I'd seen a great many partial eclipses, but a partial eclipse has the same relation to a total eclipse as flirting with a man does to marrying him. It's completely different.