Hone and spread your spirit till you yourself are a sail, whetted, translucent, broadside to the merest puff.

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

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

What do I make of all this texture? What does it mean about the kind of world in which I have been set down? The texture of the world, its filigree and scrollwork, means that there is the possibility for beauty here, a beauty inexhaustible in its complexity, which opens to my knock, which answers in me a call I do not remember calling, and which trains me to the wild and extravagant nature of the spirit I seek.

Ecstasy, I think, is a soul's response to the waves holiness makes as it nears.

Unfortunately, nature is very much a now-you-see-it, now-you-don't affair. A fish flashes, then dissolves in the water before my eyes like so much salt. Deer apparently ascend bodily into heaven; the brightest oriole fades into leaves.

I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.