“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.”

The Earth is beautiful, and bright, and kindly, but that is not all. The Earth is also terrible, and dark, and cruel. The rabbit shrieks dying in the green meadows.

The story is not in the plot but in the telling.

Life goes on, even if two-headed and glowing faintly in the dark.

Our roots are in the dark; the earth is our country.

Civilized Man says: I am Self, I am Master, all the rest is other–outside, below, underneath, subservient. I own, I use, I explore, I exploit, I control. What I do is what matters. What I want is what matter is for. I am that I am, and the rest is women & wilderness, to be used as I see fit.

We read books to find out who we are.

All knowledge is local, all truth is partial. No truth can make another truth untrue. All knowledge is part of the whole knowledge.

Listen.’ For being saved is not the point. Music saves nothing. Merciful, uncaring, it denies and breaks down all the shelters, the houses men build for themselves, that they may see the sky.

Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.

What is the other text, the original? I have no answer. I suppose it is the source, the deep sea where ideas swim, and one catches them in nets of words and swings them shining into the boat… where in this metaphor they die and get canned and eaten in sandwiches.

It’s a rare gift, to know where you need to be, before you’ve been to all the places you don’t need to be.

Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight.

If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell you it again when you’re fifty, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you’re reading a whole new book.

Men call women faithless, changeable, and though they say it in jealousy of their own ever-threatened sexual honor, there is some truth in it.

When the genuine myth rises into consciousness, that is always its message. You must change your life.

I do not care what comes after; I have seen the dragons on the wind of morning.

The great thing about civility is that it does not require you to agree with or approve of anything. You don’t even have to love your neighbor to be civil. You just have to treat your neighbor the same way you would like your neighbor to treat your grandmother, or your child.

Wilbur never forgot Charlotte. Although he loved her children and grandchildren dearly, none of the new spiders ever quite took her place in his heart. She was in a class by herself. It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both.

I’m a father, a son, and a grandson, and if anyone messed with my wife, mom, or grandmother, and if the law didn’t care about it, what would I do? Would I be defined by that action?

I never saw my grandfather because he had died before I was born, but I have good memories of my grandmother and of how she could play the piano at the old house.

People say to me, “When did you come out?” But I was never in! When I was about six, I was swanning around the house in clothes that belonged to my mother and my grandmother which I’d found in an attic, saying, “I am a beautiful princess!”

I was brought up by two women: my mother and my grandmother.

I grew up in a very British family who had been transplanted to Canada, and my grandmother’s house was filled with English books.

I was an early reader, and my grandmother, who as a child had been forbidden to read by a father who believed books.