The nice thing about a protest song is that it takes the complaint, the fussing, the finger-pointing, and gives it an added component of sociable harmony.

I woke up thinking a very pleasant thought. There is lots left in the world to read.

Books: a beautifully browsable invention that needs no electricity and exists in a readable form no matter what happens.

For me, as a beginning novelist, all other living writers form a control group for whom the world is a placebo.

Printed books usually outlive bookstores and the publishers who brought them out. They sit around, demanding nothing, for decades. That's one of their nicest qualities - their brute persistence.

I've never been a fast reader. I'm fickle; I don't finish books I start; I put a book aside for five, ten years and then take it up again.

Haven't you felt a peculiar sort of worry about the chair in your living room that no one sits in?

Poetry is prose in slow motion.

Spoon the sauce over the ice cream. It will harden. This is what you have been working for.

But spending your life concentrating on death is like watching a whole movie and thinking only about the credits that are going to roll at the end. It’s a mistake of emphasis.

Shoes are the first adult machines we are given to master.

I am grateful to the Lord for granting me just what I needed.

The Grecian’s maxim would indeed be a sweeping clause in Literature; it would reduce many a giant to a pygmy; many a speech to a sentence; and many a folio to a primer.

It is possible to wish so greatly for the unattained that in time you believe it has been won - indeed, you can even remember the winning of it.

Man's laws cannot make moral what God has declared immoral

The belief in the inevitability of war is a self-fulfilling prophecy... We need an alternative vision, to see the world as one, as interconnected.

I don't want the world to give me anything for my books except money enough to save me from the temptation to write only for money.

If those who had set themselves to explain the various theories of Christianity had set themselves instead to do the will of the Master, how different the world would be now!

How dare you ever in ya life walk past me without acknowledging their man as God.

I never expected anything to be given to me.

It's very important that we instill some respect for the parents. In America especially, the kids are unruly, screaming at mommy and daddy, running the show.