The meeting of writer and reader is an intimate act, and it properly takes place in private.

A teacher enlarges people in all sorts of ways besides just his subject matter.

I am impressed by how much of my grandparent's life depended on continuities, contacts, connections, friendships, and blood relationships.

Every green natural place we save saves a fragment of our sanity and gives us a little more hope that we have a future.

I balked at nothing, I was above nothing. Everything had something to teach me.

Young writers should be encouraged to write, and discouraged from thinking they are writers. If they arrive at college with literary ambitions, they should be told that everything they have done since their first childhood poems, printed in the school paper, has been preparation for entering a long, long apprenticeship.

Death is a convention, a certification to the end of pain, something for the vital statistics book, not binding upon anyone but the keepers of graveyard records.