“As long as I kept moving, my grief streamed out behind me like a swimmer’s long hair in water. I knew the weight was there but it didn’t touch me. Only when I stopped did the slick, dark stuff of it come floating around my face, catching my arms and throat till I began to drown. So I just didn’t stop.”

It’s a funny thing: people often ask how I discipline myself to write. I can’t begin to understand the question. For me, the discipline is turning off the computer and leaving my desk to do something else.

She is inhumanly alone. And then, all at once, she isn’t.

I prefer to remain anomalous.

To think is not always to see.

There are some who’d hardly lift a finger for kindness, but they would haul up a load of rock to dump on some soul they think’s been too lucky.

A good title holds magic, some cognitive dissonance, a little grit between the teeth, but above all it is the jumping-off place into wonder.

Write a nonfiction book, and be prepared for the legion of readers who are going to doubt your fact. But write a novel, and get ready for the world to assume every word is true.

This is how Americans think. You believe that if something terrible happens to someone, they must have deserved it.

The most important part of a story is the piece of it you don’t know.

Wherever I am, let me never forget to distinguish want from need

Sadness is more or less like a head cold – with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.

It occurs to her that there is one thing about people you can never understand well enough: how entirely inside themselves they are.

there are people who read my work and accuse me of being political! As far as I’m concerned that’s like accusing a dog of having a bark!

Poetry feels like a country I visit without a passport, where I look around furtively, grab hold of something precious, and try to smuggle it back across the border. Any poem I get written down feels like contraband to me.

Anybody can get worked up, if they have the intention. It’s peacefulness that is hard to come by on purpose.

I considered her my ally, because, like me, she was imperfect.

Television knows no night. It is perpetual day. TV embodies our fear of the dark, of night, of the other side of things.

There’s a spirit in anything, I think, into which we weave our soul. Not many pilots talk about it, but they think about it in the quiet dark of a night flight.

I can better trust those who helped to relieve the gloom of my dark hours than those who are so ready to enjoy with me the sunshine of my prosperity.

Theology is never any help; it is searching in a dark cellar at midnight for a black cat that isn’t there.

My wife was afraid of the dark… then she saw me naked and now she’s afraid of the light.

The Dark Side of the Moon is a fine album with a textural and conceptual richness that not only invites, but demands involvement.

There will always be those who must look into the dark in order to see.

In a world of fixed future, life is an infinite corridor of rooms, one room lit at each moment, the next room dark but prepared.