Peace as a positive condition of society, not merely as an interim between wars, is something so unknown that it casts no images on the mind's screen.

You have come to the shore. There are no instructions.

Both art and faith are dependent on imagination; both are ventures into the unknown.

I'm not very good at praying, but what I experience when I'm writing a poem is close to prayer.

Nothing we do has the quickness, the sureness, the deep intelligence living at peace would have.

It's when we face for a moment the worst our kind can do, and shudder to know the taint in our own selves, that awe cracks the mind's shell and enters the heart.

Grief is a hole you walk around in the daytime and at night you fall into it.

In certain ways writing is a form of prayer.

Marvelous Truth, confront us at every turn, in every guise.

One of the obligations of the writer is to say or sing all that he or she can, to deal with as much of the world as becomes possible to him or her in language.

But for us the road unfurls itself, we don't stop walking, we know there is far to go.

Whenever it rains, I remember him, not as a tear that hails down as a raindrop, but as a God of fertility. As, every time I remember him, his memories conceive a baby of emotions in me!

The real promise in too many promises is a promise that I’m going to be disappointed.

Leave it to a vampire to think a healthy guy in his late thirties or early forties was on his deathbed.

As always, violence created more violence [Jehane Noujaim, "Tahrir Square, Cairo: Lost and Found in the Square"].

What is good is also divine. Queer as it sounds, that sums up my ethics. Only something supernatural can express the Supernatural.

Violence and arms can never resolve the problems of men.

Wilderness areas are first of all a series of sanctuaries for the primitive arts of wilderness travel, especially canoeing and packing.

The enjoyment of power inevitably corrupts the judgment of reason, and perverts its liberty.

I’m very faithful to myself. When you do things that are true it just comes out quite instinctively.

[Barak] Obama's immigration behavior, executive amnesty, this DREAMer stuff - everything he's doing - is outside the law.