When you have a specific vision for something, you just go in and attack it.
It must be very fragile, if a handful of berries can bring it down.
It takes ten times as long to put yourself back together as it does to fall apart.
I wish I could freeze this moment, right here, right now and live in it forever.
If you had hope, maybe you could find a way to make things change,. Because if you thought about it, there were so many reasons to try.
Hope, it is the only thing stronger than fear. A little hope is effective, a lot of hope is dangerous.
What I need is the dandelion in the spring. The bright yellow that means rebirth instead of destruction. The promise that life can go on, no matter how bad our losses. That it can be good again.
To love the one who loves you, To admire the one who admires you, In a word, to be the idol of one's idol, Is exceeding the limit of human joy; It is stealing fire from heaven.
In writing, I'm totally anti-plans of any kind. All my attempts to plan and plot novels have come to grief, and in expensive ways.
A triumphalist corporate capitalism, free at last of the specter of Communism, has mobilized its economic power to relentlessly marginalize all nonmarket values; to subordinate every aspect of American life to corporate "efficiency" and the bottom line; to demonize not only government but the very idea of public service and public goods.
I wanted to experience both. I wanted worldly enjoyment and divine transcendence. I wanted what the Greeks called kalos kai agathos, the singular balance of the good and the beautiful. I'd been missing both during these last hard years, because both pleasure and devotion require a stress-free space in which to flourish and I'd been living in a giant trash compactor of nonstop anxiety. As for how to balance the urge for pleasure against the longing for devotion. . . well, surely there was a way to learn that trick.