Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time?

When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.

I think it's the sentence-to-sentence pleasures, the little surprises of a surprising style of an acute style, and also the way things happen one after the other, that makes a book interesting to read page to page

Rain is grace; rain is the sky descending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.

It's not up to us what we learn, but merely whether we learn through joy or through pain.

You cannot but learn more of the world's heft, as you take it now into your hands.

In general, the churches, visited by me often on weekdays... bore for me the same relation to God that billboards did to Coca-Cola; they promoted thirst without quenching it.