Obligation is a flimsy base for creativity, way down the list behind passion, courage, instinct, and the desire to do something great.
A novelist is a person who lives in other people's skins.
Uncharged with invisible meaning, the visible is nothing, mere clay; and without visible circumstance, a territory, to connect to, our spirit is shapeless, nameless, and undefined.
Most people are quiet in the world, and live in it tentatively, as if it were not their own.
There is music in words, and it can be heard you know, by thinking.
Satire's nature is to be one-sided, contemptuous of ambiguity, and so unfairly selective as to find in the purity of ridicule an inarguable moral truth.
The difference between Socrates and Jesus is that no one had ever been put to death in Socrates' name. And that is because Socrates' ideas were never made law. Law, in whatever name, protects privilege.
Men are not rich or poor according to what they possess but to what they desire. The only rich man is he that with content enjoys a competence.
I grew up in a suburban situation and I was constantly looking for the central, the town. I grew up craving. "Where's the town? Where's the people?" You get into a very isolated shell.
Every spring is the only spring, a perpetual astonishment.
It is important for knitters to know two things about frogging: that cats are capable of this knitting action, and even seem to enjoy it and seek opportunities to do it; and that foul language is a normal, healthy accompaniment to frogging, whether it is you or the cat that accomplished the task.