It seems to be difficult for anyone to take in the idea that two truths cannot conflict.

it wasn’t data that would dismantle their celestial parochialism, but storytelling.

Denise Levertov—the only woman of the fifteen—would state that poetry’s highest task is “to awaken sleepers by other means than shock.” This

We are so anxious to classify and categorize, both nature and human nature. It is a beautiful impulse—to contain the infinite in the finite, to wrest order from the chaos, to construct a foothold so we may climb toward higher truth. It is also a limiting one, for in naming things we often come to mistake the names for the things themselves.

“Was there ever a woman without vanity? or a man either? only with this difference, that among gentlemen the commodity is generally styled ambition.”

The discipline of the writer is to learn to be still and listen to what his subject has to tell him.

governed by eternal forces deaf to human words—fundamental

cessation is the ultimate nature of all things, and that any dynamism, wherever in time it may fall, however briefly, is cause for celebration.

it is perhaps unreasonable to expect a person to be singular in their gifts and graces alone, and not to be equally unlike people in other matters.