Once we have tasted far streams, touched the gold, found some limit beyond the waterfall, a season changes and we come back changed but safe, quiet, grateful.

A speech is something you say so as to distract attention from what you do not say.

I have woven a parachute out of everything broken.

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.

A student brings something to discuss, saying, "I don't know whether this is really good, or whether I should throw it in the wastebasket." The assumption is that one or the other choice is the right move. No. Almost everything we say or think or do - or write - comes in that spacious human area bounded by something this side of the sublime and something above the unforgivable.

There are so many things admirable people do not understand.

Language can do what it can’t say.