Hard times and funky living can season the soul, true enough, but joy is the yeast that makes it rise.

Teachers who offer you the ultimate answers do not possess the ultimate answers, for if they did, they would know that the ultimate answers cannot be given, they can only be received.

When I sit down to write, I just let the goose out of the bottle.

Switters was actually quite fond of Seattle's weather, and not merely because of it's ambivalence. He liked it's subtle, muted qualities and the landscape that those qualities encouraged if not engendered: vistas that seemed to have been sketched with a sumi brush dipped in quicksilver and green tea. It was fresh, it was clean, it was gently primal, and mystically suggestive.

As expected, you get his machine. Someday, even the "call of nature" will be answered by a machine.

We're our own dragons as well as our own heroes, and we have to rescue ourselves from ourselves.

In this world that God (or Mother Nature) created, it is always hazard and novelty-hazard and novelty-which assert themselves, thereby rendering notions of fixity absurd. Incongruously enough, however, when we allow ourselves to fully accept uncertainty, to embrace and cultivate it even, then we actually can begin to feel within ourselves the presence of an Absolute. The person who cannot welcome ambiguity cannot welcome God.