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.

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).

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.

Convinced that we're living the whole time that we're dying.We decide to go out walking the whole time that you're talking.Convinced that you're living whole time that I'm dying.

People's real hopes and dreams can be distorted and misdirected and packaged until you're not sure what you really want or what you even really need.

There are very few bad people. There are just a lot of people that are unlucky.

Let no one say that I have said nothing new... the arrangement of the subject is new. When we play tennis, we both play with the same ball, but one of us places it better.

Necessity is an evil; but there is no necessity for continuing to live subject to necessity.

I'm opening a store at the end of the month in the New York meatpacking district. I'm launching a line of bedding this summer, and I am writing a book that will be out next January.

If a Korean artist reaches to the top, we're all ready to stand up and applaud for him or her.

A single moment of love is equal to the whole eternity of love.

There's so much living to be squeeze into the cracks of one little day. You can make someone laugh, smile, hope, sing, think.

Nashville is my home, and the reason why I get to do what I love.