No culture has yet solved the dilemma each has faced with the growth of a conscious mind: how to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in all life, when one finds darkness not only in one’s own culture but within oneself.

To put your hands in a river is to feel the chords that bind the earth together.

When I sit at that typewriter, I have to be frightened of what I'm trying to do. I'm frightened by my own belief that I can actually get a story down on paper.

If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such paradox.

The attempt to close the gap between what is known and what IS, is the temptation behind the apple in Genesis.

It does not demean men to want to be what they imagine the wolf to be, but it does demean them to kill the animal for it.

Everything is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion.