Unfortunately, nature is very much a now-you-see-it, now-you-don't affair. A fish flashes, then dissolves in the water before my eyes like so much salt. Deer apparently ascend bodily into heaven; the brightest oriole fades into leaves.

About five years ago I saw a mockingbird make a straight vertical descent from the roof gutter of a four-story building. It was an act as careless and spontaneous as the curl of a stem or the kindling of a star.

If I actually believed that the progress of human understanding depended on our crop of contemporary novelists, I would shoot myself.

The mind itself is an art object ... The mind is a blue guitar on which we improvise the song of the world.

We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence.

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour and with that one, is what we are doing.

There are no events but thoughts and the heart's hard turning, the heart's slow learning where to love and whom. The rest is merely gossip, and tales for other times.