“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 are here on the planet only once, and might as well get a feel for the place.

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.

She was hidden, drenched in darkness. He held her hand and called her luna.

When my world grows dark I remember: Every light begins with a spark.

You live these three months in this reality, in this dark reality, you don’t want to do those films every year because they’re taxing. I started smoking a lot of cigarettes.

When it comes, you’ll be dreaming that you don’t need to breathe; that breathless silence is the music of the dark and it’s part of the rhythm to vanish like a spark.

Dark, dark! The horror of darkness, like a shroud, wraps me and bears me on through mist and cloud.

But the power of destiny is something awesome; neither wealth, nor Ares, nor a tower, nor dark-hulled ships might escape it.

Why live in the darkness all your life? Why, if you are unhappy, if you are having a miserable time, why not just look at it? Why are you in the darkness? Look for the light. The light is within.

I’m not really afraid of the dark, except if I’m walking. The thing that scares me the most is the possibility of walking into a wall and busting my lip.