You can serve or you can sing, and wreck your heart in prayer, working the world's hard work.

The world is wider in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee; we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain and Lazarus.

The Pulitzer is more useful than meaningful.

At night I read and write, and things I have never understood become clear; I reap the harvest of the rest of the year's planting

I have since only rarely seen the tree with the lights in it. The vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it, for the moment when the mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the crack, and the mountains slam.

We have not yet encountered any god who is as merciful as a man who flicks a beetle over on its feet.

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