among a coward's weapons, cynicism is the nastiest of all

The hardest thing was learning to write. I was 13, and the only writing I had done was for Social Studies. It consisted of copying passages right out of the encyclopedia

Writing is revision. All prose responds to work.

Don't worry about being worried. You're heading out on an adventure and you can always change your mind along the way and try something else.

You do the right thing even if it makes you feel bad. The purpose of life is not to be happy but to be worthy of happiness.

The combination of domesticity and wildness - that's a deep expression

Things were here before you and will be here after you're gone. The geographic features, especially, give you a sense of your own place in the world and in time

I know that to write you have to have stories you want to tell. You have to keep your mind alive, and you have to work hard.

Public education rests precariously on the skill and virtue of the people at the bottom of the institutional pyramid.

In order to go on with our lives, we are always capable of making the ominous into the merely strange.

Continuity is one of the things I like about New England.

To have been loved so deeply, even though the person who loved us is gone, will give us some protection forever.

Guilt is a feeble emotion. It surrenders too easily

If I rolled the dice carved out of my weathered boneAnd offered of my blood the libation to the faneWhen even the reaper’s mockery forsakes me aloneMy own clangorous thoughts are the last to remain

The Buddha taught that most problems - if only you give them enough time and space - will eventually wear themselves out.

I protest against the use of infinite magnitude ..., which is never permissible in mathematics.

The best theory is inspired by practice.

Selfishness is the only real atheism; aspiration, unselfishness, the only real religion.

Failure is not meant to be final and fatal.... It is meant to refine you to be all that you are meant to be.

The positive force of love can create anything good, increase good things and change anything negative in your life.