Some people are blinded by their experience. Soldiers know how important war is. Owners of slaves learn every day how inferior subject peoples are.

I heard a bird congratulating itself all day for being a jay. Nobody cared. But it was glad all over again, and said so, again.

Anyone who breathes is in the rhythm business.

It is this impulse to change the quality of experience that I recognize as central to creation. . . . Out of all that could be done, you choose one thing. What that one thing is, nothing else can tell you--you come at it over unmarked snow.

The greatest ownership of all is to glance around and understand.

A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them.

An owl sound wandered along the road with me. I didn't hear it--I breathed it into my ears.