I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.

I am a fugitive and a vagabond, a sojourner seeking signs.

At night on land migrating monarchs slumber on certain trees, hung in festoons with wings folded together, thick on the trees and shaggy as bearskin. [p. 244]

If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?" "No", said the priest, "not if you did not know." "Then why, " asked the Eskimo earnestly, "did you tell me?

The answer must be, I think, that the beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.

I smelled silt on the wind, turkey, laundry, leaves . . . my God what a world. There is no accounting for one second of it (267).

I want to climb up the blank blue dome as a man would storm the inside of a circus tent, wildly, dangling, and with a steel knife claw a rent in the top, peep, and, if I must, fall.

If, as Heraclitus suggests, god, like an oracle, neither "declares nor hides, but sets forth by signs, " then clearly I had better be scrying the signs.

I was still ringing. I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.

Innocence is a better world.

When we lose our innocence - when we start feeling the weight of the atmosphere and learn that there's death in the pot - we take leave of our sense.

What you believe might be wrong

You end up as you deserve. In old age you must put up with the face, the friends, the health, and the children you have earned.

Ethics is a detergent word, used time and time again to clean consciences without scrubbing.

A well known Los Angeles newspaper referred to a small group of gentlemen who live up on a mountain and practice Zen as 'the Zen cult'. The cult phenomenon is definitely journalistically 'in'.

Compulsion precedes morality, indeed morality itself is compulsion for a time, to which one submits for the avoidance of pain.

Theres no question that photographs communicate more instantly and powerfully than words do, but if you want to communicate a complex concept clearly, you need words, too.

All of the searching, all of the struggling, all of the efforting to find your true self is naturally revealed in open, relaxed simplicity.

I welcome the Democrats' ideas on Social Security. I think it is very important to make a bipartisan reform.

We have all seen these circus elephants complete with tusks, ivory in their head and thick skins, who move around the circus ring and grab the tail of the elephant ahead of them.

Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art - the art of words.