“I lay there knowing something eerie ties us to the world of animals. Sometimes the animals pull you backward into it. You share hunger and fear with them like salt in blood.”

My function as a writer is to provide an atmosphere in which people can think wisely about what we’re doing on this planet.

The most intelligent thing we can do is love, not reason.

One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse.

Have we come all this way, I wondered, only to be dismantled by our own technologies, to be betrayed by political connivance or the impersonal avarice of a corporation?

We cannot, of course, save the World because we do not have authority over its parts. We can serve the world though. That is everyone’s calling, to lead a life that helps.

Everything is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion.

When I sit at that typewriter, I have to be frightened of what I’m trying to do. I’m frightened by my own belief that I can actually get a story down on paper.

The writer works on the inside and the critic works on the outside. I don’t know what it looks like on the outside, sometimes. It’s not that I’m not interested-it’s not where I live. I live inside the story.

My faith is in my colleagues. And when I meet other writers, journalists, who’ve been doing this for a long time, trying to make us aware of what it is that we’re living in, I put my faith in those people.

The land urges us to come around to an understanding of ourselves.

In behaving respectfully toward all that the land contains, it is possible to imagine a stifling ignorance falling away from us.

There’s so much to be afraid of.

The land is like poetry: it is inexplicably coherent, it is transcendent in its meaning, and it has the power to elevate a consideration of human life.

The land gets inside of us; and we must decide one way or another what this means, what we will do about it.

For so many centuries, the exchange of gifts has held us together. It has made it possible to bridge the abyss where language struggles.

The opposite of love is not hate; it’s indifference. To be indifferent is to not express love.

Remember Killer Moth, the most ingenuous rogue ever to defy the dynamic duo, Batman and Robin ?

Another thing I find extremely eerie is that when people build a house, they almost exactly get it wrong. They don’t just get it partly wrong, they get it dead wrong.

That we don’t design agriculture to be sustainable is totally eerie. We design it to be a disaster, and of course, we get a disaster.

In the New Yorker library, I have long been shelved between Nadine Gordimer and Brendan Gill; an eerie little space nestled between high seriousness of purpose and legendary lightness of touch.

It’s an eerie feeling, as if my old mentor is not just in the room, but in my shoes, using me as his mouthpiece.

The world of Shirley Jackson is eerie and unforgettable.