What she did was to open our eyes to details of country life such as teaching us names of wild flowers and getting us to draw and paint and learn poetry.

It was a world that I wanted to record because it was such a miracle visitation to me.

For the first time I was learning how much easier it was to leave than to stay behind and love.

Bees blew like cake-crumbs through the golden air, white butterflies like sugared wafers, and when it wasn't raining a diamond dust took over which veiled and yet magnified all things

But our waking life, and our growing years, were for the most part spent in the kitchen, and until we married, or ran away, it was the common room we shared.

Such a morning it is when love leans through geranium windows and calls with a cockerel's tongue. When red-haired girls scamper like roses over the rain-green grass, and the sun drips honey.

I was set down from the carrier's cart at the age of three; and there with a sense of bewilderment and terror my life in the village began.

All civilizations at some time have fallen into this total terror, when the mystery of life was a kind of panic only to be assuaged by the spilling of blood.

I wanted to communicate what I had seen, so that others could see it.

In London, Man is the most secret animal on earth.

Effie M. was a monster. Six foot high and as strong as a farm horse.No sooner had she decided that she wanted UncleTom than she knocked him off his bicycle and told him.

Life exists for the love of music or beautiful things.

Mathematics has the inhuman quality of starlight, brilliant and sharp, but cold.

It's sort of a mental attitude about critical thinking and curiosity. It's about mindset of looking at the world in a playful and curious and creative way.

Nothing twists and deforms the soul more than a low or unworthy conception of God

I've learned over the years that the writing is smarter and far larger than the writer and his or her own desires for it.

When we are eager to be shy and humble about our accomplishments, we lose confidence in our abilities.

Unfair in practice is not the same thing as wrong in principle, but sometimes it has to do.

Here I am, safely returned over those peaks from a journey far more beautiful and strange than anything I had hoped for or imagined - how is it that this safe return brings such regret?

You can't please everyone so you gotta please yourself.

You could afford your house without the government if it weren't for the government.