475 quotes found
“Thought creates character.”
“Innocence is a better world.”
“I wish I knew how to quit you.”
“Point your fire like a flower.”
“All must pay the debt of nature.”
“You can't test courage cautiously.”
“No, they didnt have any money, the sea was dangerous and men were lost, but it was a satisfying life in a way people today do not understand. There was a joinery of lives all worked together, smoot...”
“I wonder how many people don't get the one they want, but end up with the one they're supposed to be with.”
“Think of a globe, a revolving globe on a stand. Think of a contour globe, whose mountain ranges cast shadows, whose continents rise in bas-relief above the oceans. But then: think of how it really ...”
“What I aim to do is not so much learn the names of the shreds of creation that flourish in this valley, but to keep myself open to their meanings, which is to try to impress myself at all times wit...”
“The gaps are the thing. The gaps are the spirit's one home, the altitudes and latitudes so dazzlingly spare and clean that the spirit can discover itself like a once-blind man unbound. The gaps are...”
“When her doctor took her bandages off and led her into the garden, the girl who was no longer blind saw the tree with the lights in it. It was for this tree I searched through the peach orchards of...”
“Cruelty is a mystery, and the waste of pain. But if we describe a world to compass these things, a world that is a long, brute game, then we bump against another mystery: the inrush of power and li...”
“You cannot mend the chromosome, quell the earthquake, or stanch the flood. You cannot atone for the dead tyrants murders and you alone cannot stop living tyrants. As Martin Buber saw it, the world ...”
“The secret of seeing is, then the pearl of great price. If I thought he could teach me to find it and keep it forever I would stagger barefoot across a hundred deserts after any lunatic at all. But...”
“I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too. I am not washed and beautiful, in control of a shining world...”
“At a certain point, you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world, Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive. You empty yourself and wait, listening. After a time you ...”
“Nature's silence is its one remark, and every flake of world is a chip off that old mute and immutable block.”
“It is difficult to undo our own damage, and to recall to our presence that which we have asked to leave. It is hard to desecrate a grove and change your mind. The very holy mountains are keeping mu...”
“In nature, improbabilities are the one stock in trade. The whole creation is one lunatic fringe. If creation had been left up to me, I'm sure I wouldn't have had the imagination or courage to do mo...”
“Were the earth smooth, our brains would be smooth as well; we would wake, blink, walk two steps to get the whole picture, and lapse into a dreamless sleep.”
“I chanced on a wonderful book by Marius von Senden, called Space and Sight. . . . For the newly sighted, vision is pure sensation unencumbered by meaning: "The girl went through the experience that...”
“Today is one of those excellent January partly cloudies in which light chooses an unexpected part of the landscape to trick out in gilt, and then the shadow sweeps it away. You know youre alive. Yo...”
“A weight lands on me, and a strong doubt that I will not be able to fully commit to the ideas of this strange religion out here in the cold north. I look at the girls pale skin flushed slightly acr...”
“A lifetime of lonely regret or happiness with some pain along the way.”
