We often take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.

What I felt then I feel now: the inexorable, unchanging interior hum of doubt and hope.

Travelers are fantasists, conjurers, seers - and what they finally discover is that every round object everywhere is a crystal ball: stone, teapot, the marvelous globe of the human eye.

To imagine the unimaginable is the highest use of the imagination

Is there a word more passionate than passion? Obsession, total immersion, the feeling that everything else doesn't matter.

Godlessness invariably produces vulgarity. Civilization is the product of belief.

... woman is frequently praised as the more "creative" sex. She does not need to make poems, it is argued; she has no drive to make poems, because she is privileged to make babies. A pregnancy is as fulfilling as, say, Yeats' Sailing to Byzantium.... To call a child a poem may be a pretty metaphor, but it is a slur on the labor of art.