When you get to a certain age, the work begins to thin out.
The politics of surprise leads through the Gates of Astonishment into the Kingdom of Hope.
The turning point in the process of growing up is when you discover the core of strength within you that survives all hurt.
America is a passionate idea or it is nothing. America is a human brotherhood or it is chaos.
Either men will learn to live like brothers, or they will die like beasts.
We all run on two clocks. One is the outside clock, which ticks away our decades and brings us ceaselessly to the dry season. The other is the inside clock, where you are your own timekeeper and determine your own chronology, your own internal weather and your own rate of living. Sometimes the inner clock runs itself out long before the outer one, and you see a dead man going through the motions of living.
I am neither an optimist nor pessimist, but a possibilist.
Real talent doesn't always win championships, like real music doesn't always win Grammys.
You cannot imagine the craving for rest that I feel-a hunger and thirst. For six long days, since my work was done, my mind has been a whirlpool, swift, unprogressive and incessant, a torrent of thoughts leading nowhere, spinning round swift and steady.
Grief does not expire like a candle or the beacon on a lighthouse. It simply changes temperature. It becomes a kind of personal weather system. Snow settles in the liver. The bowels grow thick with humidity. Ice congeals in the stomach. Frost spiderwebs in the lungs. The heart fills with warm rain that turns to mist and evaporates through a colder artery.
Do you remember when everyone began analyzing Beatles songs. . I don't think I ever understood what some of them were supposed to be about