“Her endeavor was misguided and wrong and maybe plain crazy, akin to someone waking up one day and deciding he’s going to scale Kilimanjaro because he can’t stop imagining the view from the top, the picture so arresting and beautiful that it too soon delivers him to a precarious ledge, where he can no longer turn back. And while it’s easy to say this is a situation to be avoided, isn’t this what we also fear and crave simultaneously, that some internal force which defies understanding might remake us into the people we dream we are?”

“I often think that the prime directive for me as a teacher of writing is akin to that for a physician, which is this: do no harm.”

“It’s perhaps more laudable to simply keep heading out into the world, than always tilting to leave one’s mark on it.”

“Does any program really improve anybody, as much as simply identifying them? And, after identifying them, not ruining them?”

“It was in the work that she came closest to finding herself, by which we don’t mean gaining “self-knowledge” or understanding one’s “true nature” but rather how at some point you can see most plainly that this is what you do, this is how you fit in the wider ecology”

“Does any (MFA) program really improve anybody, as much as simply identifying them? And, after identifying them, not ruining them?”

“It was in the work that she came closest to finding herself, by which we don’t mean gaining “self-knowledge” or understanding one’s “true nature” but rather how at some point you can see most plainly that this is what you do, this is how you fit in the wider ecology.”

“He should have had more faith in himself rather than give in to his weaker qualities, in particular his overeagerness to please and aversion to conflict and a lifelong infatuation with hope, which had him dreaming more than doing”

“Our tainted world looms within us, every one.”

“In this difficult era the most valuable commodity is the unfailing turn of the hours and how they retrieve for us the known harbor of yesterday.”

“For at some point, each of us will be asked to embody what we feel and know.”