No one can help you if you're stuck in a work. Only you can figure a way out, because only you can see the work's possibilities.

Whenever there is stillness there is the still small voice, God's speaking from the whirlwind, nature's old song, and dance.

In literary history, generation follows generation in a rage.

If I actually believed that the progress of human understanding depended on our crop of contemporary novelists, I would shoot myself.

The point of the dragonfly's terrible lip, the giant water bug, birdsong, or the beautiful dazzle and flash of sunlighted minnows,is not that it all fits together like clockwork--for it doesn'tbut that it all flows so freely wild, like the creek, that it all surges in such a free, finged tangle. Freedom is the world's water and weather, the world's nourishment freely given, its soil and sap: and the creator loves pizzazz.

We sleep to time's hurdy-gurdy; we wake, if ever we wake, to the silence of God. And then, when we wake to the deep shores of time uncreated, then when the dazzling dark breaks over the far slopes of time, then it's time to toss things, like our reason, and our will; then it's time to break our necks for home. There are no events but thoughts and the heart's hard turning, the heart's slow learning where to love and whom. The rest is merely gossip, and tales for other times.

Nature's silence is its one remark, and every flake of world is a chip off that old mute and immutable block.