“Civilized Man says: I am Self, I am Master, all the rest is other–outside, below, underneath, subservient. I own, I use, I explore, I exploit, I control. What I do is what matters. What I want is what matter is for. I am that I am, and the rest is women & wilderness, to be used as I see fit.”

I believe that all the best faculties of a mature human being exist in the child. . . that one of the most deeply human, and humane, of these faculties is the power of imagination.

The presence of the trees was very strong…The big oaks stood so many, so massive in their other life, in their deep, rooted silence: the awe of them came on me, the religion.

It is very hard for evil to take hold of the unconsenting soul.

Even with the best intentions, language misused, language used stupidly, carelessly, brutally, language used wrongly, breeds lies, half-truths, confusion. In that sense you can say that grammar is morality. And it is in that sense that I say a writer’s first duty is to use language well.

To hear, one must be silent.

To see that your life is a story while you’re in the middle of living it may be a help to living it well.

Fantasy is not antirational, but pararational; not realistic but surrealistic, a heightening of reality. In Freud’s terminology, it employs primary not secondary process thinking. It employs archetypes which, as Jung warned us, are dangerous things.

Take the tale in your teeth, then, and bite till the blood runs, hoping it’s not poison.

We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.

What is life without incompatible realities?

The performance is silent. The readers hear the sounds of the words and the beat of the sentences only in their inner ear. Silent drummers on noiseless drums. An amazing performance in an amazing theater.

Reading is performance. The reader–the child under the blanket with a flashlight, the woman at the kitchen table, the man at the library desk–performs the work.

If it were proven that there is no God there would be no religion. …But also if it were proven that there is a God, there would be no religion.

I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant.

I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived.

We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel… is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.

Yet even under the most crushing state machinery courage rises up again and again, for fear is not the natural state of civilized man.

So much nearer to Nature than civilized men are; absurd then to maintain cruelty is a consequence of depravity. . . .

We are all civilized people, wich means that we are all savages at heart but observing a few amenities of civilized behaviour.

It seems to me the mark of a civilized society that certain privileges should be taken for granted such as education, health care and the safety to walk the streets.