I would like to learn, or remember, how to live.

Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles.

Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark.

Somewhere, and I can't find where, I read about an Eskimo hunter who 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 know

Crystals grew inside rock like arithmetic flowers. They lengthened and spread, added plane to plane in an awed and perfect obedience to an absolute geometry that even stones -- maybe only the stones -- understood.

I woke at intervals until . . . the intervals of waking tipped the scales, and I was more often awake than not.