Great Throughts Treasury

"The self persists like a dying star, in sleep, afraid."

"The shape of a rat? It's bigger than that. It's less than a leg and more than a nose, just under the water it usually goes."

"The soul has many motions, body one."

"The stones were sharp, the wind came at my back; walking along the highway, mincing like a cat."

"The whisky on your breath could make a small boy dizzy; but I hung on like death; such waltzing was not easy."

"This shaking keeps me steady. I should know. What falls away is always. And is near. I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. I learn by going where I have to go."

"Those who are willing to be vulnerable move among mysteries."

"Time for the flat-headed man. I recognize that listener, him with the platitudes and rubber doughnuts, melting at the knees, a varicose horror. Hello, hello. My nerves knew you, dear boy. Have you come to unhinge my shadow?"

"We think by feeling. What is there to know?"

"Time marks us while we are marking time."

"Water's my will, and my way, and the spirit runs, intermittently, in and out of the small waves,"

"What is desire? — The impulse to make someone else complete? That woman would set sodden straw on fire."

"Wheels shake the roadbed stone, the pistons jerk and shove, I stay up half the night to see the land I love."

"What falls away is always. And is near."

"What shakes the eye but the invisible? Running from God's the longest race of all."

"What is madness but nobility of soul at odds with circumstance."

"When I saw that clumsy crow flap from a wasted tree, a shape in the mind rose up:"

"With these I would be. And with water: the waves coming forward, without cessation, the waves, altered by sand-bars, beds of kelp, miscellaneous driftwood, topped by cross-winds, tugged at by sinuous undercurrents the tide rustling in, sliding between the ridges of stone, the tongues of water, creeping in, quietly."

"Who rise from flesh to spirit know the fall: the word outleaps the world, and light is all."