"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."

"Just think: in all the clean, beautiful reaches of the solar system, our planet alone is a blot; our planet alone has death."

"How can people think that artists seek a name? There is no such thing as an artist - only the world, lit or unlit, as the world allows."

"Trees have a curious relationship to the subject of the present moment. There are many created things in the universe that outlive us, that outlive the sun, even, but I can't think about them. I live with trees."

"You are wrong if you think that you can in any way take the vision and tame it... The vision is not so much destroyed, exactly, as it is, by the time you have finished, forgotten. It has been replaced by this changeling."

"By dipping us children in the Bible so often, they hoped, I think, to give our lives a serious tint, and to provide us with quaintly magnificent snatches of prayer to produce as charms while, say, being mugged for our cash or jewels."

"Buddhism notes that it is always a mistake to think your soul can go it alone."

"A shepherd on a hilltop who looks at a mess of stars and thinks, ‘There’s a hunter, a plow, a fish,’ is making mental connections that have as much real force in the universe as the very fires in those stars themselves."

"Ecstasy, I think, is a soul's response to the waves holiness makes as it nears."