The last cobwebs of fog in the black firtrees are flakes of white ash in the world's hearth.

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.

What he could bear in the waking world he could not by night and he sat awake for fear the dream would return.

To appear in heaven, let yourself disappear amongst the beauties of nature!

How do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values?

In my judgment, the only way to deal with terrorists is to stay on the offensive, is to find them and bring them to justice before they hurt us again.

[R]eason is... given to us as a practical faculty, that is, as one that influences the will.

You can certainly go to war about it, but to me it seems pointless.

Whenever I read statistical reports, I try to imagine my unfortunate contemporary, the Average Person, who, according to these reports, has 0.66 children, 0.032 cars, and 0.046 TVs.

Singles hitters drive Fords. Home-run hitters drive Cadillacs.

I really do like to write and when I'm not, I think, "Okay, I'll be a good citizen now" but fact is, that's secondary.

For me and my storytelling and the way that I embrace stories in the way that I embrace characters, I desperately needed to know that everything was okay.