On plenty of days the writer can write three or four pages, and on plenty of other days he concludes he must throw them away.

I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too.

We live half our waking lives and all of our sleeping lives in some private, useless, and insensible waters we never mention or recall.

What is important is the moment of opening a life and feeling it touch--with an electric hiss and cry--this speckled mineral sphere, our present world.

Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery.

Silence is not our heritage but our destiny; we live where we want to live.

The sense impressions of one-celled animals are not edited for the brain. This is philosophically interesting in a rather mournful way, since it means that only the simplest animals perceive the universe as it is.