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

Experiencing the present purely is being empty and hollow; you catch grace as a man fills his cup under a waterfall.

We are here on the planet only once, and might as well get a feel for the place.

Does anything eat flowers. I couldn't recall having seen anything eat a flower - are they nature's privileged pets?

When you write, you lay out a line of words. The line of words is a miner's pick, a wood carver's gouge, a surgeon's probe. You wield it, and it digs a path you follow. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory. Is it a dead end, or have you located the real subject? You will know tomorrow, or this time next year.

Nothing on earth is more gladdening than knowing we must roll up our sleeves and move back the boundaries of the humanly possible once more.

Learn punctuation; it is your little drum set, one of the few tools oyu have to signal the reader where the beats and emphases go. (If you get it wrong, any least thing, the editor will throw your manuscript out.) Punctuation is not like musical notation; it doesn't indicate the length of pauses, but instead signifies logical relations. There are all sorts of people out there who know these things very well. You have to be among them even to begin.