It was actually a women's writing group I belonged to in graduate school that gave me the courage to move from poetry to fiction.

[God] will not be used as a convenience. Men or nations who think they can revive the Faith in order to make a good society might just as well think they can use the stairs of heaven as a shortcut to the nearest chemist's shop.

C.S. Lewis

Government is not reason it is not eloquent it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.

George Washington

The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.

Willa Cather

A sex symbol becomes a thing.... I just hate to be a thing.

Marilyn Monroe, As quoted in Ms.

When desire, having rejected reason and overpowered judgment which leads to right, is set in the direction of the pleasure which beauty can inspire, and when again under the influence of its kindred desires it is moved with violent motion towards the beauty of corporeal forms, it acquires a surname from this very violent motion, and is called love.

Socrates

Then, of course, there are those sad occasions when a poet or a writer has not grown, and one has to let them go because they're just not making headway. But we have a very clear personal relationship with the authors.

James Laughlin

Inner work is finding joy in work. Our real work is heart work and soul work.

Matthew Fox

If man has good corn, or wood, or boards, or pigs to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles, or church organs, than anybody else, you will find a broad, hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun? And what is it to cease breathing but to free the breath from its restless tides, that it may rise and expand and seek God unencumbered?

Kahlil Gibran

Nothing we use or hear or touch can be expressed in words that equal what we are given by the senses.

Hannah Arendt

One mustn

Gustave Flaubert, Trans. by Will

Ill blows the wind that profits nobody

William Shakespeare