11 Quotes by Fenton Johnson

To choose to be alone is to bait the trap, to create a space the demons cannot resist entering. And that's the good news; the demons that enter can be named, written about, and tamed through the miracle of the healing word, the miracle of art, the miracle of silence.

Grief is love’s alter ego, after all, yin to its yang, the necessary other; like night, grief has its own dark beauty. How may we know light without knowledge of dark? How may we know love without sorrow? “The disorientation following such loss can be terrible, I know” Wendell Berry wrote me on learning of Larry’s death. “But grief gives the full measure of love, and it is somehow reassuring to learn, even by suffering, how large, and powerful love is.

To choose to be alone is to bait the trap, to create a space the demons cannot resist entering. And that’s the good news; the demons that enter can be named, written about, and tamed through the miracle of the healing word, the miracle of art, the miracle of silence.

When crises come, though friends and relatives may be generous and eager to help, in the end it is I, alone on the trail, alone in the museum, alone in the courtroom, alone in the emergency room, alone in the morgue, alone in my illness, alone in my reading, alone in my writing, alone in the silence of my heart.

For travel is a stimulus to the imagination, and imagination is the very path to love.

We must teach ourselves to value flux, but more than that, we must teach ourselves to value and attend to friends, not as way-stations between lovers or diversions from the real business of pairing up and marriage, but as relationships of first consequence in their own right.

Why don’t the entertainment industry and religious institutions support more songs, books, movies praising friendship? Because friendship, unlike marriage, offers no capital to church, state, and corporation.

Never change your plans because of the weather, be Zen and go with the weather, let the weather reveal itself to you in all its variety and grandeur.

Wisdom begins in listening; listening begins in silence; silence is rooted in solitude.