Paradise is only for those who have already been there.

In real life wishing, divorced from willing, is sterile and begets nothing.

Wars, invented and organized by the highest available consciousnesses (do the worms go to war? do the fish? do the paramecia?), are the planet's chief source and cause of torment.

It isn't the instrument that influences High-Minded or Low-Minded; it's the quality of Mind itself.

The imagination is a species of knowledge, knowledge that can take the form of discovery.

The power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to.

I measure my life in sentences pressed out, line by line, like the lustrous ooze on the underside of the snail, the snail's secret open seam, its wound, leaking attar.