The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.

Like any child, I slid into myself perfectly fitted, as a diver meets her reflection in a pool. Her fingertips enter the fingertips on the water, her wrists slide up her arms. The diver wraps herself in her reflection wholly, sealing it at the toes, and wears it as she climbs rising from the pool, and ever after.

We are here to abet creation and to witness to it, to notice each other's beautiful face and complex nature so that creation need not play to an empty house.

Cruelty is a mystery, and the waste of pain. But if we describe a word to compass these things, a world that is a long, brute game, then we bump against another mystery: the inrush of power and delight, the canary that sings on the skull.

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.

Every day is a god, each day is a god, and holiness holds forth in time.

The way you live your days is the way you live your life.