I wonder if children don't begin to reject both poetry and religion for similar reasons, because the way both are taught takes the life out of them.

Before you begin a thing, remind yourself that difficulties and delays quite impossible to foresee are ahead. If you could see them clearly, naturally you could do a great deal to get rid of them but you can't. You can only see one thing clearly and that is your goal. Form a mental vision of that and cling to it through thick and thin.

Just the knowledge that a good book is waiting one at the end of a long day makes that day happier.

I am learning to see loneliness as a seed that, when planted deep enough, can grow into writing that goes back out into the world.

We shortchange ourselves by regarding religious faith as a matter of intellectual assent. This is a modern aberration; the traditional Christian view is far more holistic, regarding faith as a whole-body experience. Sometimes it is, as W.H. Auden described it, 'a matter of choosing what is difficult all one's days as if it were easy.

Friendship is an art, and very few persons are born with a natural gift for it.

There seems to be so much more winter than we need this year.