“I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night.”

There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room.

The silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence.

And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.

I am what I feel and think and do.

Tomorrow is another day toward death.

We should meet in another life, we should meet in air, me and you.

I want to write because I have the urge to excel in one medium of translation and expression of life.

I desire the things that will destroy me in the end.

Hour by hour, day by day, life becomes possible.

There is a certain unique and strange delight about walking down an empty street alone.

I love life. But it is hard and I have so much, so very much to learn.

The truth comes to me. The truth loves me.

She stared at her reflection in the glossed shop windows as if to make sure, moment by moment, that she continued to exist.

It’s a hell of a responsibility to be yourself. It’s much easier to be somebody else or nobody at all.

If the body is a temple, then tattoos are its stained glass windows.

The constant struggle in mature life, I think, is to accept the necessity of tragedy and conflict, and not to try to escape to some falsely simple solution which does not include these more somber complexities.

The idea of losing the three at Hayward Field and the idea of losing my specialty to someone who wasn’t running his specialty. Mostly, the idea of losing in front of my people. They haven’t forgotten about me.

No one will ever win a 5,000-meter by running an easy two miles. Not against me.

Being over seventy is like being engaged in a war. All our friends are going or gone and we survive amongst the dead and the dying as on a battlefield.

I have been a wanderer among distant fields. I have sailed down mighty rivers.

In a democracy, there should be representation from every field.

Take rest; a field that has rested gives a beautiful crop.

Anyone who sees and paints a sky green and fields blue ought to be sterilized.

Whenever you interact with people, don’t be there primarily as a function or a role, but as the field of conscious presence. You can only lose something that you have, but you cannot lose something that you are.