In literary history, generation follows generation in a rage..

If I actually believed that the progress of human understanding depended on our crop of contemporary novelists, I would shoot myself..

The morning woods were utterly new. A strong yellow light pooled beneath the trees; my shadow appeared and vanished on the path, since a third of th….

Could two live that way? Could two live under the wild rose, and explore by the pond, so that the smooth mind of each is as everywhere present to the….

Divinity is not playful. The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensibl e earnest. By a power that is unfathomably secret, and holy,….

Like any child, I slid into myself perfectly fitted, as a diver meets her reflection in a pool. Her fingertips enter the fingertips on the water, her….

Who and of what import were the men whose bones bulk the Great Wall, the thirty million Mao starved, or the thirty million children not yet five who ….

The extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation..

I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too..

You do not have to sit outside in the dark. If, however, you want to look at the stars, you will find that darkness is necessary. But the stars neith….

I know only enough of God to want to worship him, by any means ready to hand..

Noticing and remembering everything would trap bright scenes to light and fill the blank and darkening past which was already piling up behind me. Th….

Almost all of my many passionate interests, and my many changes of mind, came through books. Books prompted the many vows I made to myself..

There is always the temptation in life to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for years on end. It is all so self conscien….

I feel as though I stand at the foot of an infinitely high staircase, down which some exuberant spirit is flinging tennis ball after tennis ball, ete….

By dipping us children in the Bible so often, they hoped, I think, to give our lives a serious tint, and to provide us with quaintly magnificent snat….

What is important is the moment of opening a life and feeling it touch--with an electric hiss and cry--this speckled mineral sphere, our present worl….

An Inuit hunter asked the local missionary priest: If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell? No, said the priest, not if you did not k….

I'm a housewife: I spend far more time on housework than anything else..

Nothing moves a woman so deeply as the boyhood of the man she loves..

If you're going to publish a book, you probably are going to make a fool of yourself..