How could a just God permit great misery? The Haitian peasants answered with a proverb: "Bondye konn bay, men li pa konn separe," in literal translation, "God gives but doesn't share." This meant... God gives us humans everything we need to flourish, but he's not the one who's supposed to divvy up the loot. That charge was laid upon us.

Don't worry about being worried. You're heading out on an adventure and you can always change your mind along the way and try something else.

...Attempts at imitation would put the emphasis where it didn't belong. The goal was to improve the lives of others, not oneself.

The combination of domesticity and wildness - that's a deep expression

In order to go on with our lives, we are always capable of making the ominous into the merely strange.

The problem is fundamental... It is as if a secret committee, now lost to history, has made a study of children and, having figured out what the greatest number were least disposed to declared that all of them should do it.

I'm going to a commune in Vermont and will deal with no unit of time shorter than a season.