The first fact of the world is that it repeats itself. I had been taught to believe that the freshness of children lay in their capacity for wonder at the vividness and strangeness of the...

August is dust here. Droughtstuns the road,but juice gathers in the berries.

Nostalgia locates desire in the past where it suffers no active conflict and can be yearned toward pleasantly.

But usually not. Usually she thinks of the path to his house, whether deer had eaten the tops of the fiddleheads, why they don’t eat the peppermint saprophytes sprouting along the creek; or she visualizes...

And then I realized—,”which is the part of stories one never quite believes.I had the idea that the world’s so full of painit must sometimes make a kind of singing.And that the sequence helps, as...

So few things we need to know.And the old wisdoms shudder in us and grow slack.Like renunciation. Like the melancholy beautyof giving it all up. Like walking steadfastin the rhythms, winter light and summer dark.And...

One may prefer spring and summer to autumn and winter, but preference is hardly to the point. The earth turns, and we live in the grain of nature, turning with it.

It’s hell writing and it’s hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.

Golf is a worrier’s game, inward, concentrated, a matter of inches, invented by the same people who gave us Presbyterianism.

Imagination runs through the places where we live like water. We need both things-a living knowledge of the land and a live imagination of it and our place in it- if we are going to...

All the new thinking is about loss. In this it resembles all the old thinking

Take the time to write. You can do your life’s work in half an hour a day.