Pain in this life is not avoidable, but the pain we create avoiding pain is avoidable.
If one were forced to select a single word to exemplify Bishop's peculiar charm and power, it might well be 'No. '
I cling to the optimistic belief that the haphazard and the hopscotch, the creature that sips among many flowers, may actually come up with something.
I read not so long ago about the construction of a large telescope in Chile's Atacama Desert, where rainfall can average a millimetre a year and the air is fifty times as dry as the air in Death Valley. Needless to say, skies over the Atacama are pristine. The pilgrim astronomer ventures to the earth's ravaged reaches in order to peer more keenly at other worlds, and I suppose the novelist is up to something similar.
If we do not learn by heart, the heart does not feel the rhythms of poetry as echoes or variations of its own insistent beat.
If knowledge is power and power corrupt, does knowledge corrupt?
One of the most stupid things to do is to pretend you are smart. When you pretend to be smart, you are at the height of stupidity.
I truly believe that one of the things that has been lacking in America is a spirit of repentance about the injustices of slavery and the injustices of segregation and racism generally. I truly believe that we cannot come to a place of reconciliation until there is individual repentance and corporate repentance.
It's the real world, full of gaps and inconsistencies and anticlimaxes.