“Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I’m going to go fulfill my proper function in the social organism. I’m going to unbuild walls.”

The performance is silent. The readers hear the sounds of the words and the beat of the sentences only in their inner ear. Silent drummers on noiseless drums. An amazing performance in an amazing theater.

Reading is performance. The reader–the child under the blanket with a flashlight, the woman at the kitchen table, the man at the library desk–performs the work.

If it were proven that there is no God there would be no religion. …But also if it were proven that there is a God, there would be no religion.

I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant.

I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived.

We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel… is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.

f we can get feminine and human morality out from under the yoke of a dead ethic, then maybe we’ll begin to get somewhere on the road that leads to survival.

We’re each of us alone, to be sure. What can you do but hold your hand out in the dark?

The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid.

You are in the country where you make up the rules, the laws. You are both dictator and obedient populace. It is a country nobody has ever explored before. It is up to you to make the maps, to build the cities.

The worst walls are never the ones you find in your way. The worst walls are the ones you put there .

As great scientists have said and as all children know, it is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception, and compassion, and hope.

A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart.

You will die. You will not live forever. Nor will any man nor any thing. Nothing is immortal. But only to us is it given to know that we must die. And that is a great gift: the gift of selfhood. For we have only what we know we must lose, what we are willing to lose…

The two imperatives can no longer coexist with each other; nor can any society founded on the myth that they can be reconciled hope to survive.

The important thing is not the finding, it is the seeking, it is the devotion with which one spins the wheel of prayer and scripture, discovering the truth little by little.

Often I find that poems predict what I’m going to do later in my own writing, and often I find that poems predict my life. So I think poetry is the most intense expression of feeling that we have.

The problem is that ego can convert anything to its own use, even spirituality.

The stars in the sky are really other suns like our own, around which orbit other planets. (paraphrase)

If the writing is good, then the result seems effortless and inevitable. But when you want to say something life-changing or ineffable in a single sentence, you face both the limitations of the sentence itself and the extent of your own talent.

You must personally accept the responsibility of improving your own life.

The third petition of the Lord’s Prayer is repeated daily by millions who have not the slightest intention of letting anyone’s will be done but their own.

She is one of God’s women fashioned by His own hand to show us men and other women that there is a heaven where we can enter, and that its light can be here on earth.

There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that is your own self. So you have to begin there, not outside, not on other people. That comes afterwards, when you have worked on your own corner.