when a gourd is hollowed out it becomes empty and is of great use to the world because of its emptiness.

Perhaps we clutch at life only when we have never lived or trusted it. Then death seems the last and greatest defeat, the end of something never felt.

We overlook how much in our lives is invisible; love, for instance; thought, God, the future, time, faith, hope and even the electricity that brings us light.

The best things arrive on time.

... old clothes, old friends, old books. One needs constants in a traveling life.

What continues to astonish me about a garden is that you can walk past it in a hurry, see something wrong, stop to set it right, and emerge an hour or two later breathless, contented, and wondering what on earth happened.

When we live with a memory we live with a corpse; the impact of the experience has changed us once but can never change us again.