“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.”

“They had killed themselves over our dying forests, over manatees maimed by propellers as they surfaced to drink from garden hoses; they had killed themselves at the sight of used tires stacked high...”

“The world seemed to shimmer a little at the edges.”

“If we cannot accept the importance of the world, which considers itself important, if in the midst of that world our laughter finds no echo, we have but one choice: to take the world as a whole and...”

“We sit for a few more moments, although there's really nothing left to say. This is new to me, too, an entire conversation that takes place in silence, because the heart has its own language. I wil...”

“I'm always amazed at anyone's interest in what I have to say.”

“The least one can say of power is that a vocation for it is suspicious.”

“With God on your side, what does luck matter?”

“That's not a good idea.”

“Fitch is on his way. He's coming after he blows up some wizards.”