“All the new thinking is about loss. In this it resembles all the old thinking”

“Take the time to write. You can do your life's work in half an hour a day.”

“The first fact of the world is that it repeats itself. I had been taught to believe that the freshness of children lay in their capacity for wonder at the vividness and strangeness of the particula...”

“Paradise Lost was printed in an edition of no more than 1,500 copies and transformed the English language. Took a while. Wordsworth had new ideas about nature: Thoreau read Wordsworth, Muir read Th...”

“Nostalgia locates desire in the past where it suffers no active conflict and can be yearned toward pleasantly.”

“It's hell writing and it's hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.”

“Protesters are still on the fringes like satellites, revolving around the system. But prophets and poets lead us into a new world, beyond simply yelling at the old one.”

“Why do I write? Out of fear. Out of fear that the memory of the people I write about might go lost. Out of fear that the memory of myself might get lost. Or even just to be shielded by a story, to ...”

“They say that it is always poets that die in wars, and I never got over a sense of being in the trenches.”