I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn't flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames.

Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed?

For all the insularity of the old guard, Pittsburgh was always an open and democratic town.

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

We are most deeply asleep at the switch when we fancy we control any switches at all.

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

There is a certain age at which a child looks at you in all earnestness and delivers a long, pleased speech in all the true inflections of spoken English, but with not one recognizable syllable. There is no way you can tell the child that if language had been a melody, he had mastered it and done well, but that since it was in fact a sense, he had botched it utterly.