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

The worst walls are never the ones you find in your way. The worst walls are the ones you put there .

As great scientists have said and as all children know, it is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception, and compassion, and hope.

A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart.

You will die. You will not live forever. Nor will any man nor any thing. Nothing is immortal. But only to us is it given to know that we must die. And that is a great gift: the gift of selfhood. For we have only what we know we must lose, what we are willing to lose…

The two imperatives can no longer coexist with each other; nor can any society founded on the myth that they can be reconciled hope to survive.

The important thing is not the finding, it is the seeking, it is the devotion with which one spins the wheel of prayer and scripture, discovering the truth little by little.

There are no right answers to wrong questions.

Fantasy is nearer to poetry, to mysticism, and to insanity than naturalistic fiction is. It is a wilderness, and those who go there should not feel too safe.

Success is somebody else’s failure.

You sit down and you do it, and you do it, and you do it, until you have learned to do it.

I certainly wasn’t happy. Happiness has to do with reason, and only reason earns it. What I was given was the thing you can’t earn, and can’t keep, and often don’t even recognize at the time; I mean joy.

As a kitten does what all other kittens do, so a child wants to do what other children do, with a wanting that is as powerful as it is mindless. Since we human beings have to learn what we do, we have to start out that way, but human mindfulness begins where that wish to be the same leaves off.

All of us have to learn how to invent our lives , make them up, imagine them.

The book itself is a curious artifact, not showy in its technology but complex and extremely efficient: a really neat little device, compact, often very pleasant to look at and handle, that can last decades, even centuries.

The dance is always danced above the hollow place, above the terrible abyss.

Hardly anybody ever writes anything nice about introverts. Extroverts rule. This is rather odd when you realise that about nineteen writers out of twenty are introverts.

I dance is the one that linked the cities of prosperity and chance.

In a time where everything’s a flavor of the month, and it’s hard to have any sort of longevity,

Now we the American working population Hate the fact that eight hours a day Is wasted on chasing the dream of someone that isn’t us And we may not hate our jobs But we hate jobs in general That don’t have to do with fighting our own causes.

There’s smoke in my iris, but I painted a sunny day on the insides of my eyelids

The mother’s battle for her child with sickness, with poverty, with war, with all the forces of exploitation and callousness that cheapen human life needs to become a common human battle, waged in love and in the passion for survival.

It’s hard to stand around and make conversation with people I’ve learned. But I do want to be the guy that can do it easily.

…I’ve never had a dream in my life, Because a dream is what you wanna do, but still haven’t pursued.

Dream a little dream, Or you can live a little dream I’d rather live it ‘Cause dreamers always chase But never get it