I cannot cause light; the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam.

There were no formerly heroic times, and there was no formerly pure generation. There is no one here but us chickens, and so it has always been.

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

I still try to keep my eyes open. I'm always on the lookout for antlion traps in sandy soil, monarch pupae near milkweed, skipper larvae in locust leaves. These things are utterly common, and I've not seen one

You are wrong if you think that you can in any way take the vision and tame it... The vision is not so much destroyed, exactly, as it is, by the time you have finished, forgotten. It has been replaced by this changeling.

The mind itself is an art object. It is a Mondrian canvas onto whose homemade grids it fits its own preselected products. Our knowledge is contextual and only contextual. Ordering and invention coincide: we call their collaboration knowledge.

All my books started out as extravagant and ended up pure and plain.