“We are most deeply asleep at the switch when we fancy we control any switches at all.”

At a certain point, you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world, Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive. You empty yourself and wait, listening.

The world knew you before you knew the world.

Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery.

The secret is not to write about what you love best, but about what you, alone, love at all.

These are our few live seasons. Let us live them as purely as we can, in the present.

The extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation.

I break up through the skin of awareness a thousand times a day, as dolphins burst through seas, and dive again, and rise, and dive.

I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn’t flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames.

Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac.

You’ve got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.

There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by.

You do not have to sit outside in the dark. If, however, you want to look at the stars, you will find that darkness is necessary. But the stars neither require nor demand it.

We have not yet encountered any god who is as merciful as a man who flicks a beetle over on its feet.

One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time…give it, give it all, give it now.

People love pretty much the same things best. A writer looking for subjects inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all.

I would like to learn, or remember, how to live.

I’m a human being and I fall in love and sometimes I don’t have control of every situation.

I’m a human being and I fall in love and sometimes I don’t have control of every situation.

You’ve gotta keep control of your time, and you can’t unless you say no. You can’t let people set your agenda in life.

God is directing your steps. He may not have sent the storm, but He is in control of the storm.

I love directing, I really do. The whole concept of being in control of a presentation, particularly a movie or a show where you’re dealing with actors and crew.

Vulnerability is not about winning or losing. It’s having the courage to show up even when you can’t control the outcome.

Evolution is not a genetically controlled distortion of one adult form into another; it is a genetically controlled alteration in a developmental program.

You have it in your control to determine what this country’s gonna look like the next four years.