The essence of all religion is to be willing to risk your life for a belief - not for survival.
Truth has beauty, power, and necessity.
To think of losing is to lose already.
It is best as one grows older to strip oneself of possessions, to shed oneself downward like a tree, to be almost wholly earth before one dies.
The fatal flaw of gravity; when you are down, everything falls down on you.
One cannot overestimate the power of a good rancorous hatred on the part of the stupid. The stupid have so much more industry and energy to expend on hating. They build it up like coral insects.
I wish I could write librettos for the rest of my life. It is the purest of human pleasures, a heavenly hermaphroditism of being both writer and musician. No wonder that selfish beast Wagner kept it all to himself.
If I could've picked a birthday it would've been on Halloween. Yeah, it's always been my favorite holiday. Not because it was my birthday, but actually because, I think it was the freedom, you know? When you were a little kid, you got to go out and be an adult for a couple of hours. You got to, like, just go out with your friends and knock on peoples' doors and be nuts and pull pranks and stuff like that. You could be whoever you wanted to be, you know, I guess that was the appeal to it.
There’s no room for bravado when you’re alone in the bush.
Social media's currency is the single photograph. Whereas, every time I look at a photograph, I look at twenty or thirty photographs. I'm looking for a narrative. And that's a different kind of construct. If you're a poet and you put a line from your poem online, "The trees bending over gracefully," or something, you can get a tick. But that has nothing to do with your longer poem.
Not since the Lord himself showed his stuff to Ezekiel in the valley of dry bones had anyone shown such grace and skill in the reconstruction of animals from disarticulated skeletons. Charles R. Knight, the most celebrated of artists in the reanimation of fossils, painted all the canonical figures of dinosaurs that fire our fear and imagination to this day.