You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then-and only then-it is handed to you.
Old memories are very easy to get except that once you write about something you've destroyed it. 
There is a muscular energy in sunlight corresponding to the spiritual energy of wind. 
Every spring he vowed to quit teaching school, and every summer he missed his pupils and searched for them on the streets. 
The courage of children and beasts is a function of innocence. 
This hospital, like every other, is a hole in the universe through which holiness issues in blasts. It blows both ways, in and out of time. 
I work mornings only. I go out to lunch. Afternoons I play with the baby, walk with my husband, or shovel mail. 
The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there. 
I read with the pure, exhilarating greed of readers sixteen, seventeen years old; 
It's a little silly to finally learn how to write at this age. But I long ago realized I was secretly sincere. 
I could very calmly go wild. 
Write as if you were dying. 
I write in my own journal when something extraordinary or funny happens. And there's some nice imagery in there. I don't think of what to do with it. 
You can't test courage cautiously. 
I couldn't unpeach the peaches. 
The soul may ask God for anything, and never fail. 
Nothing moves a woman so deeply as the boyhood of the man she loves. 
Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark. 
The general rule in nature is that live things are soft within and rigid without. 
Life by its mere appalling length is a feat of endurance for which you haven't the strength. 
The dear, stupid body is as easily satisfied as a spaniel. 
Admire the world for never ending on you as you would an opponent, without taking your eyes away from him, or walking away.
Buddhism notes that it is always a mistake to think your soul can go it alone. 
Push it. examine all things intensely and relentlessly. 
We live half our waking lives and all of our sleeping lives in some private, useless, and insensible waters we never mention or recall. 
I woke in bits, like all children, piecemeal over the years. I discovered myself and the world, and forgot them, and discovered them again. 
Silence is not our heritage but our destiny; we live where we want to live. 
The extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation. 
We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence ... 
It is the beginning of a work that the writer throws away. 
1. Only a total unself-consciousness will permit me to live with myself (202). 
The dedicated life is the life worth living. You must give with your whole heart. 
I know only enough of God to want to worship him, by any means ready to hand. 
The interior life is often stupid. 
Spend the afternoon, you can't take it with you. 
If we were to judge nature by common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe the world existed. 
Eskimo: "If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?" Priest: "No, not if you did not know." Eskimo: "Then why did you tell me? 
I would like to learn, or remember, how to live. 
We are most deeply asleep at the switch when we fancy we control any switches at all. 
So live. I'll be the nun for you. I am now. 
A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order - willed, faked, and so brought into being. 
Lick a finger: feel the now. 
The sea pronounces something, over and over, in a hoarse whisper; I cannot quite make it out. 
All my books started out as extravagant and ended up pure and plain. 
When I first read the words 'introvert' and 'extrovert' when I was 10, I thought I was both. 
I woke at intervals until ... the intervals of waking tipped the scales, and I was more often awake than not. 
Look upstream. Just simply turn around; have you no will? 
Put yourself out of your misery. 
Nothing on earth is more gladdening than knowing we must roll up our sleeves and move back the boundaries of the humanly possible once more. 
An Eskimo shaman said, "Life's greatest danger lies in the fact that man's food consists entirely of souls". 
The secret of seeing is to sail on solar wind. 
You can't test courage cautiously, so I ran hard and waved my arms hard, happy. 
It is no less difficult to write a sentence in a recipe than sentences in Moby Dick. So you might as well write Moby Dick. 
We still & always want waking. 
No one can help you if you're stuck in a work. Only you can figure a way out, because only you can see the work's possibilities. 
Whenever there is stillness there is the still small voice, God's speaking from the whirlwind, nature's old song, and dance ... 
The more you read, the more you will write. The better the stuff you read, the better the stuff you will write. 
They dissolved when I tried to inspect them, or dimmed, or slid dizzyingly away, like a ship's stern yawing down the dark lee slope of a wave. 
The dedicated life is worth living. You must give your whole heart to whatever you do. 
No one ever said it would be easy 
Where is privacy, if not in the mind? 
I had been chipping at the world idly, and had by accident uncovered vast and labyrinthine further worlds within it. 
On plenty of days the writer can write three or four pages, and on plenty of other days he concludes he must throw them away. 
The Pulitzer is more useful than meaningful. 
At its best, the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace. It is handed to you, but only if you look for it. 
There were no formerly heroic times, and there was no formerly pure generation. There is no one here but us chickens, and so it has always been. 
Novels written with film contracts in mind have a faint but unmistakable, and ruinous, odor. 
If the sore spot is not fatal, if it does not grow and block something, you can use its power for many years, until the heart resorbs it. 
As a life's work, I would remember everything - everything, against loss. I would go through life like a plankton net. 
If I actually believed that the progress of human understanding depended on our crop of contemporary novelists, I would shoot myself. 
I wake expectant, hoping to see a new thing. 
There is always an enormous temptation to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end. 
I cannot cause light; the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam. 
Are you living just a little and calling that life? 
No one escapes the wilderness on the way to the promised land. 
Anything can happen, and anything does; 