Quotes About Inspiration

The pen moves; the ideas form, as if by spirit hand. Something shines out, a truth so self-evident that the words dictate themselves. We're cashing in a billion years of planetary savings bonds and blowing it on assorted bling. And what Douglas Pavlicek wants to know is why this is so easy to see when you're by yourself in a cabin on a hillside, and almost impossible to believe once you step out of the house and join several billion folks doubling down on the status quo.

The solitary act of sitting over the page and waiting for her hand to move may be as close as she'll ever get to the enlightenment of plants.

She writes her favorite lines in the inside covers of her field notebooks and peeks at them when department politics and the cruelty of frightened humans get her down. The words withstand the full brutality of day. We all travel the Milky Way together, trees and men. . . . In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks. The clearest way into the universe is through a forest wilderness.

Do not invent anything; simply discover it.

leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.

Its effect is like that of a higher thought or a better emotion coming over me, when I deemed I was thinking justly or doing right.

They can't believe a kid worked for months on an original idea, for no reason at all except the pleasure of looking until you see something.

Her breakthrough comes as breakthroughs often do: by long and prepared accident.

Down another branch, this one, she shouts, "Here's to unsuicide," and flings the cup of swirling green over the gasping audience.

He tells her, on their drives, about all the oblique miracles that green can devise.

They form in front of him: his friend, his wife, his daughter. People who loved him, who believed he'd do good things. In the mild April mist, he thinks: All I ever wanted was to make one slight noise that might delight you all. How small a thought it took. How small a thought.

How life managed to add imagination to all the other tricks in its chemistry set is a mystery

Well-being is like a virus. One self-assured person at home in this world can infect dozens of others. Wouldn't you like to see an epidemic of infectious well-being?

Whole new rooms open up in Adam's brain, ready to be furnished.

Independent thought—a power of attraction all its own.

Something magnificent and enduring hid under music's exhausted surface. Somewhere behind the familiar staff lay constellations of notes, sequences of pitches that could bring the mind home.

You have given me a thing I could never have imagined, before I knew you. It's like I had the word "book," and you put one in my hands. I had the word "game," and you taught me how to play. I had the word "life," and then you came along and said, "Oh! You mean this.

Els had staked his life on finding that larger thing. Something magnificent and enduring hid under music's exhausted surface. Somewhere behind the familiar staff lay constellations of notes, sequences of pitches that could bring the mind home.

She looks for the towering black locust, with its fragrant racemes and pea-pod seeds, the tree that stunned Muir into becoming a naturalist. But the world-changing locust was cut down twelve years before.

A chemical semaphore passes through Nick's brain: Suppose a person had sculpted any one of these, just as they stand. That single work would be a landmark of human art.

Holy jump up and sit down.

It's a bang on the head that births up whole sciences.

The library was the best dungeon crawl imaginable: free loot for the finding, combined with the joy of leveling up.

It's what his muscles know, especially that largest muscle in his inventory—his soul.