Poetry is engendered in solitude, so what better meter for it than the clip of a buckskin horse?

The novelist screws up his courage in order to invest another two or three years in another attempt to float a boat of original design upon an invented ocean.

If a person sings quietly to himself on the street people smile with approval; but if he talks it's not alright; they think he's crazy. The singer is presumed to be happy and the talker unhappy.

Silence is exhilarating at first - as noise is - but there is a sweetness to silence outlasting exhilaration, akin to the sweetness of listening and the velvet of sleep.

Indeed, if "biology is chemistry with history," as somebody has said, then nature writing is biology with love.

In order to really enjoy a dog, one doesn't merely try to train him to be semi-human. The point of it is to open oneself to the possibility of becoming partly a dog.

There often seems to be a playfulness to wise people, as if either their equanimity has as its source this playfulness or the playfulness flows from equanimity; and they can persuade other people who are in a state of agitation to calm down and smile.