We are such inward secret creatures, that inwardness is the most amazing thing about us, even more amazing than our reason.

All artists dream of a silence which they must enter, as some creatures return to the sea to spawn.

There is a spider called Amaurobius, which lives in a burrow and has its young in the late summer, and then it dies when the frosts begin, and the young spiders live through the cold by eating their mother's dead body. One can't believe that's an accident. I don't know that I imagined God as having thought it all out, but somehow He was connected with the pattern, He was the pattern.

In philosophy if you aren't moving at a snail's pace you aren't moving at all.

The bottomless bitter misery of childhood: how little even now it is understood. Probably no adult misery can be compared with a child's despair.

Most of our love is shabby stuff, but there is always a thin line of gold, the bit of pure love on which all the rest depends -- and which redeems all the rest.

Dogs are very different from cats in that they can be images of human virtue. They are like us.