“I study nature so as not to do foolish things.”

“I study nature so as not to do foolish things.”

“I have become an orchidwashed in on the salt white beach.Memory,what can I make of it nowthat might please you-this life, already wastedand still strewn with miracles?”

“It looks like it’s wasting time, but literature is actually the ultimate time-saver – because it gives us access to a range of emotions and events that it would take you years, decades, millennia to try to experience directly. Literature is the greatest reality simulator — a machine that puts you through infinitely more situations than you can ever directly witness.”

“I study nature so as not to do foolish things.”

“It is not what a poem says with its mouth, it’s what a poem does with its eyes.”

“In one sense, reading is a great waste of time. In another sense, it is a great extension of time, a way for one person to live a thousand and one lives in a single lifespan, to watch the great impersonal universe at work again and again,”