It's when we face for a moment the worst our kind can do, and shudder to know the taint in our own selves, that awe cracks the mind's shell and enters the heart.

Peace as a positive condition of society, not merely as an interim between wars, is something so unknown that it casts no images on the mind's screen.

Looking, Walking, Being, I look and look. Looking's a way of being: one becomes, sometimes, a pair of eyes walking. Walking wherever looking takes one. The eyes dig and burrow into the world. They touch, fanfare, howl, madrigal, clamor. World and the past of it, not only visible present, solid and shadow that looks at one looking. And language? Rhythms of echo and interruption? That's a way of breathing. breathing to sustain looking, walking and looking, through the world, in it.

Mediocrity is perhaps due not so much to lack of imagination as to lack of faith in the imagination, lack of the capacity for this abandon.

I'll dig in into my days, having come here to live, not to visit. Grey is the price of neighboring with eagles, of knowing a mountain's vast presence, seen or unseen.

In certain ways writing is a form of prayer.

Prophetic utterance, like poetic utterance, transforms experience and moves the receiver to new attitudes. The kinds of experience--the recognitions or revelations--out of which both prophecy and poetry emerge, are such as to stir the prophet or poet to speech that may exceed their own known capacities; they are "inspired," they breathe in revelation and breathe out new words; and by so doing they transfer over to the listener or reader a parallel experience, a parallel intensity, which impels that person into new attitudes and new actions.