To stay in one place and watch the seasons come and go is tanatmount to constant travel: One is traveling with the earth.

But happiness is brittle, and if men and circumstances don't destroy it, it is threatened by ghosts.

Ancient and oriental civilizations were more sensitive than we are to the cycles of things; to the succession of generations, both divine and human; and to change within stasis. Western man is virtually alone in wanting to make his God into a fortress and personal immortality into a bulwark against time.

nothing is slower than the true birth of a man

I don't think I ever relinquish a person I have known, and surely not my fictional characters. I see them, I hear them, with a clarity that I would call hallucinatory if hallucination didn't mean something else ... A character whom we create can never die, any more than a friend can die ... Through [my characters] I've lived many parallel lives.

The world is big … May it please the One who perchance is to expand the human heart to life's full measure.

The written word has taught me to listen to the human voice, much as the great unchanging statues have taught me to appreciate bodily motions.