Desire is creation, is the magical element in that process. If there were an instrument by which to measure desire, one could foretell achievement.

In other searchings it might be the object of the quest that brought satisfaction, or it might be something incidental that one got on the way; but in religion, desire was fulfilment, it was the seeking itself that rewarded.

youth, when it is hurt, likes to feel itself betrayed.

I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do. I feel as if this tree knows everything I ever think of when I sit here. When I come back to it, I never have to remind it of anything; I begin just where I left off.

Wherever humanity has made that hardest of all starts and lifted itself out of mere brutality is a sacred spot.

Art, it seems to me, should simplify finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole - so that all that one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader's consciousness as much as if it were in type on the page.

People have to snatch at happiness when they can, in this world. It is always easier to lose than to find.