“Write about winter in the summer.”

What a hideout: Holiness lies spread and borne over the surface of time and stuff like color.

The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.

It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance.

Nature is, above all, profligate.

I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you.

Experiencing the present purely is being empty and hollow; you catch grace as a man fills his cup under a waterfall.

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

Nothing moves a woman so deeply as the boyhood of the man she loves.

Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you.

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

There are no events but thoughts and the heart’s hard turning, the heart’s slow learning where to love and whom. The rest is merely gossip, and tales for other times.

Art is like an ill-trained Labrador retriever that drags you out into traffic.

I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as a dying friend. I hold its hand and hope it will get better.

Mountains are giant, restful, absorbent. You can heave your spirit into a mountain and the mountain will keep it, folded, and not throw it back as some creeks will. The creeks are the world with all its stimulus and beauty; I live there. But the mountains are home.

Nature’s silence is its one remark, and every flake of world is a chip off that old mute and immutable block.

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.

We were at a beach one summer, and I had a bathing suit on.

Summer is more wooing and seductive, more versatile and human, appeals to the affections and the sentiments, and fosters inquiry and the art impulse.

He who marvels at the beauty of the world in summer will find equal cause for wonder and admiration in winter.

I propose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer.

Secluded waters of some pool or lakelet, are the crown and summit of the floral expeditions of summer.

Left ear, I wear four earrings. The four is symbolic of the four seasons, spring, winter, summer and fall, the four directions, north, east, south and west, the four gospel writers, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

England is like the margin of a spring-run: near its source, always green, always cool, always moist, comparatively free from frost in winter and from drought in summer.

We number our days and divide our seasons. We endlessly define what it is to be in love. When in truth, spring blurs into summer and always has, long before that line was ever drawn.