“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.”

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.

We will not know our own injustice if we cannot imagine justice. We will not be free if we do not imagine freedom.

Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.

The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.

To the lives that haven’t been lived yet. That will be my gift back to the world that gave me the life I did live, the love I loved, the breath I breathed.

All makers must leave room for the acts of the spirit. But they have to work hard and carefully, and wait patiently, to deserve them.

Those who build walls are their own prisoners.

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.

Success isn’t about the biggest house in the world. Success is about loving your family, taking care of your child.

Both childbirth and abortion are medical procedures but neither is an illness, and sometimes they’re both treated as such.

She had always assumed that she would have years to sort out the meaning of life…

As she bent over the child she realized that the tragedy of death had to do entirely with what was left unfulfilled.

It was an accident, although I’ve been involved in some kind of theatrical function or other since I was a child – in school, music, athletics.

So long as one does not become simple like a child, one does not get divine illumination.

Great men have the nature of a child.

Forget all the worldly knowledge that thou hast acquired and become as a child, and then will thou get the divine wisdom.