We are most deeply asleep at the switch when we fancy we control any switches at all.

Possibly everyone now dead considered his own death as a freak accident, a mistake. Some bad luck caused it. Every enterprising man jack of them, and every sunlit vigorous woman and child, too, who had seemed so alive and pleased, was cold as a meat hook, and new chattering people trampled their bones unregarding, and rubbed their hands together and got to work improving their prospects till their own feet slipped and they went under themselves ... Every place was a tilting edge.

The Pulitzer is more useful than meaningful.

How you spend your days is how you spend your life.

A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order - willed, faked, and so brought into being.

Are you living just a little and calling that life?

A shepherd on a hilltop who looks at a mess of stars and thinks, ‘There’s a hunter, a plow, a fish,’ is making mental connections that have as much real force in the universe as the very fires in those stars themselves.