"Spend the afternoon, you can't take it with you."

"Somewhere and I can't find where I read about an Eskimo hunter who asked the local missionary priest 'If I did not know about God and sin would I go to hell?' 'No' said the priest 'not if you did not know.' 'Then why ' asked the Eskimo earnestly 'did you tell me?'"

"Could two live that way? Could two live under the wild rose, and explore by the pond, so that the smooth mind of each is as everywhere present to the other, and as received and as unchallenged, as falling snow?"

"I read about an Eskimo hunter who asked the local missionary priest, 'If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?' 'No,' said the priest, 'not if you did not know.' 'Then why,' asked the Eskimo earnestly, 'did you tell me?"

"Under her high brows, she eyed him straight on and straight across. She had gone to girls' schools, he recalled later. Those girls looked straight at you."

"Your work is to keep cranking the flywheel that turns the gears that spin the belt in the engine of belief that keeps you and your desk in midair."

"I was still ringing. I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck."

"What have we been doing all these centuries but trying to call God back to the mountain, or, failing that, raise a peep out of anything that isn't us? What is the difference between a cathedral and a physics lab? Are not they both saying: Hello? We spy on whales and on interstellar radio objects; we starve ourselves and pray till we're blue."

"Today is one of those excellent January partly cloudies in which light chooses an unexpected part of the landscape to trick out in gilt, and then the shadow sweeps it away. You know you're alive. You take huge steps, trying to feel the planet's roundness arc between your feet."

"Private life, book life, took place where words met imagination without passing through the world."

"She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live."

"There must be bands of enthusiasts for everything on earth-fanatics who shared a vocabulary a batch of technical skills and equipment and perhaps a vision of some single slice of the beauty and mystery of things of their complexity fascination and unexpectedness."

"The writer studies literature, not the world. He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write."