When one burns one’s bridges, what a very nice fire it makes.

Thought is the wind and knowledge the sail.

Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.

It will never rain roses: when we want to have more roses we must plant more trees.

When I walk with you I feel as if I had a flower in my buttonhole.

You can tell the tree by the fruit it bears. You see it through what the organization is delivering as far as a concrete program. If the tree’s fruit sours or grows brackish, then the time has come to chop it down – bury it and walk over it and plant new seeds.

Like getting into a bleeding competition with a blood bank.

I think that I do feel that my nature is to express what this self, this particular self at this time, experiences in the world. And that is so organic – I use this metaphor a lot but I’ll use it again – it’s like a pine tree producing pine cones, or a blackberry bush producing blackberries – it’s just what happens with this being, now.

A wounded deer leaps the highest.

Why slap them on the wrist with feather when you can belt them over the head with a sledgehammer.

Old age is like a plane flying through a storm. Once you’re aboard, there’s nothing you can do.

If your heart is a volcano, how shall you expect flowers to bloom?

When I hear a man preach, I like to see him act as if he were fighting bees.

Language is wine upon the lips.

Men do change, and change comes like a little wind that ruffles the curtains at dawn, and it comes like the stealthy perfume of wildflowers hidden in the grass.

We are born believing. A man bears beliefs as a tree bears apples.

I’m really looking forward to seeing what life brings to me.

There may be a great fire in our hearts, yet no one ever comes to warm himself at it, and the passers-by see only a wisp of smoke.

When they speak, dead frogs fall out of their mouths.

He was like a cock who thought the sun had risen to hear him crow.

My books are like water; those of the great geniuses are wine. (Fortunately) everybody drinks water.

Fame is like a river, that beareth up things light and swollen, and drowns things weighty and solid.

Good writing is like a windowpane.

His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly’s wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred.

Victory is a fleeting thing in the gambling business. Today’s winners are tomorrow’s blinking toads, dumb beasts with no hope.

Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and – since there is no other metaphor – also the soul.

I’m kind of a big kettle. It takes time to get boiled, but then I’m always hot.

Neither should a ship rely on one small anchor, nor should life rest on a single hope.

One word from the Lord is like a piece of gold to a believer, who is like a jeweler, shaping and hammering out the promise for a number of weeks.

All men are equal before fish.

It is the flash which appears, the thunderbolt will follow.

Books are as useful to a stupid person as a mirror is useful to a blind person.

Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. But anger is like fire. It burns it all clean.

The world is like a grand staircase, some are going up and some are going down.

I think the reason my stories have been so successful is that I have a strong sense of metaphor.

Just cause you got the monkey off your back doesn’t mean the circus has left town.

One may have a blazing hearth in one’s soul and yet no one ever came to sit by it. Passers-by see only a wisp of smoke from the chimney and continue on their way.

Words are only painted fire; a look is the fire itself.

I hate the past – especially my own past.

Would that I were a dry well, and that the people tossed stones into me, for that would be easier than to be a spring of flowing water that the thirsty pass by, and from which they avoid drinking.

A woman’s heart must be of such a size and no larger, else it must be pressed small, like Chinese feet; her happiness is to be made as cakes are, by a fixed recipe.

They consider me to have sharp and penetrating vision because I see them through the mesh of a sieve.

Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does.

Marriage is like a game of chess except the board is flowing water, the pieces are made of smoke and no move you make will have any effect on the outcome.

Thaw with her gentle persuasion is more powerful than Thor with his hammer. The one melts, the other breaks into pieces.

Hell is a half-filled auditorium.

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.

Some people regard private enterprise as a predatory tiger to be shot. Others look on it as a cow they can milk. Not enough people see it as a healthy horse, pulling a sturdy wagon.

It is good to express a thing twice right at the outset and so to give it a right foot and also a left one. Truth can surely stand on one leg, but with two it will be able to walk and get around.

The worst thing that happens to you may be the best thing for you if you don’t let it get the best of you.

To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don’t grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float.

Blessed are the forgetful: for they get the better even of their blunders.

A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.

He who laughs best today, will also laughs last.

When the prison doors are opened, the real dragon will fly out.

Men shut their doors against a setting sun.

One day it will be over, and I don’t care.

The fatal metaphor of progress, which means leaving things behind us, has utterly obscured the real idea of growth, which means leaving things inside us.

Poverty is a veil that obscures the face of greatness. An appeal is a mask covering the face of tribulation.

On life’s vast ocean diversely we sail. Reasons the card, but passion the gale.

Stand a little less between me and the sun.