“Is it not so presumptuous to write a word? To write a word is to give the word a space all of its own. You build a home for it and hope it can find itself at home among all the other words. Nestled...”

“I would like to do more in appreciating the mindset of the child. Maybe it has something to do with taking ourselves very seriously and with great disregard, as well as having a healthy does of awe...”

“Art allows us to die over and over without actually dying. Only we must catch our breath.”

“I let quiet shape what I say, then realize there is nothing that can be fully saidthe reason for gestures and eyes and art. Always something waiting, wanting, expectant, yet also curiously not.”

“Maybe all you need to do is find the heartbeat in everything. And if writing is living, the discovery of the beat of a heart, then when you read me, you are living by my side.”

“If I could simply place the various parts of myself into the night sky to occasionally glance up and behold myselfmaybe in the end I am only hoping to vicariously soak up some starlight.”

“Rights and duties, sounded more entertaining than duties and rights.”

“And you know once a man has fished, or watched the thrushes hovering in flocks over the village in the bright, cool, autumn days, he can never really be a townsman, and to the day of his death he w...”

“The truth is, there is good and bad in everybody, in every nation, in every race, and in every religion. To hear someone say that all the people that belong to a certain country, race, or religion ...”

“Country life has its advantages,' he used to say. 'You sit on the veranda drinking tea and your ducklings swim on the pond, and everything smells good. . . and there are gooseberries.”

“How you live your life is up to you. You have to go out and grab the world by the horns. Rope it before it ties you down and decides for you.”

“I know perfectly well that it is impossible, according to arithmetic and scholarly books, to live in a far valley off a handful of ewes and two low yield cows. But we live, I say. You children all ...”

“You know (to adopt the easy or conversational style) that you and I belong to a happy minority. We are the sons of the hunters and the wandering singers, and from our boyhood nothing ever gave us g...”

“It's not like you can just stop loving someone overnight”

“But sometimes even people who care about each other need some time apart.”