The irregular and intimate quality of things made entirely by the human hand.

I kept as still as I could. Nothing happened. I did not expect anything to happen. I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.

The voice is a wild thing. It can't be bred in captivity.

From two ears that had grown side by side, the grains of one shot up joyfully into the light, projecting themselves into the future, and the grains from the other lay still in the earth and rotted; and nobody knew why.

I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.

I had killed a big snake. I was now a big fellow.

Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.