“My world, my Earth is a ruin. A planet spoiled by the human species. We multiplied and fought and gobbled until there was nothing left, and then we died.”

The book is all there, all at once, between its covers. But if you want to read the story and understand it, you must begin with the first page, and go forward, always in order. So the universe would be a very great book, and we would be very small readers.

Life–evolution–the whole universe of space/time, matter/energy–existence itself–is essentially change.

The world is in balance . To light a candle is to cast a shadow.

The danger in trying to do good is that the mind comes to confuse the intent of goodness with the act of doing things well.

When you light a candle, you also cast a shadow.

That selfhood which is our torment, and our treasure, and our humanity, does not endure. It changes; it is gone, a wave on the sea. Would you have the sea grow still and the tides cease, to save one wave, to save yourself?

We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries-the realists of a larger reality.

It doesn’t have to be plugged in, activated, or performed by a machine; all it needs is light, a human eye, and a human mind. It is not one of a kind, and it is not ephemeral. It lasts. It is reliable.

The road goes upward towards the light; but the laden traveler may never reach the end of it.

We can change our life, our being; no matter what our will is, we are changed. As the moon changes yet is one, so we are virgin, wife, mother, grandmother.

What is the use trying to describe the flowing of a river at any one moment, and then at the next moment, and then at the next, and the next, and the next? You wear out. You say: There is a great river, and it flows through this land, and we have named it History.

You can go home again…so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.

Things don’t have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What’s the function of a galaxy?

The only questions that really matter are the ones you ask yourself.

You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change.

Translation is entirely mysterious. Increasingly I have felt that the art of writing is itself translating, or more like translating than it is like anything else.

All human beings hang by a thread, an abyss may open under their feet at any moment, and yet they have to go and invent all sorts of difficulties for themselves and spoil their lives.

Illness isn’t the only thing that spoils the appetite.

Pleasure is often spoiled by describing it.

I’m one of these guys that just spoils the environment. I like ATVs and snowmobiles. I have a motorcycle up there, and I like cruising through the hills.

I love children. They’re so much fun and I would have a blast spoiling them.

All badness is spoiled goodness. A bad apple is a good apple that became rotten. Because evil has no capital of its own, it is a parasite that feeds on goodness.

If you find a perfect church don’t join it: You’d spoil it.

Sometimes I think we know too much about our idols and that spoils the dream.