We sleep to time's hurdy-gurdy; we wake, if ever we wake, to the silence of God. And then, when we wake to the deep shores of time uncreated, then when the dazzling dark breaks over the far slopes of time, then it's time to toss things, like our reason, and our will; then it's time to break our necks for home. 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.

Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery.

The way you live your days is the way you live your life.

I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as a dying friend. I hold its hand and hope it will get better.

No one can help you if you're stuck in a work. Only you can figure a way out, because only you can see the work's possibilities.

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

Nature seems to exult in abounding radicality, extremism, anarchy. If we were to judge nature by its common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe the world existed. In nature, improbabilities are the one stock in trade. The whole creation is one lunatic fringe. ... No claims of any and all revelations could be so far-fetched as a single giraffe.