Take the time to write. You can do your life's work in half an hour a day.

It's hell writing and it's hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.

Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings, saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances.

Poetry is a fireplace in summer or a fan in winter.

If you're imaginatively responsible to the place you live in, you understand the watershed.

The birds are silent in the woods. / Just wait: soon enough / You will be quiet too

Imagination runs through the places where we live like water. We need both things-a living knowledge of the land and a live imagination of it and our place in it- if we are going to preserve it.

Repetition makes us feel secure and variation makes us feel free.

Writing is an incessant process of discovery.

One may prefer spring and summer to autumn and winter, but preference is hardly to the point. The earth turns, and we live in the grain of nature, turning with it.

You only truly believe that which moves you to action.

Hope is desire and expectation rolled into one.

When I first met him, he did not care if a friend did not fit into his world, because at that time his world had not been born yet.

It isn't just what you know, and it isn't just who you know. It's actually who you know, who knows you, and what you do for a living.

We allowed ourselves to become particularly interested in research into the appearance of intermediate products of sugar decomposition during cell-free fermentation.

The voice of humility is God's music, and the silence of humility is God's rhetoric.

Realistically, I think we are not prepared to go home until we do get more teachers and lower class sizes.

There is something haunting in the light of the moon; it has all the dispassionateness of a disembodied soul, and something of its inconceivable mystery.

When someone asks about Boston, I put my brain on pause. I feel like I took a 5,000 pounds off my back to be here.

It isn't the desire to abide by the law that makes everyone behave as society requires, but the fear of punishment. Each one of us carries a gallows inside us.