Sitting at the tables of caf?s in the cities I visited, I found myself thinking that everything tasted to me of dreams, of emptiness. I sometimes found myself wondering if I was still sitting at the table of out old house, motionless and dazzled by dreams! I cannot promise you that this is not what is happening, that I am not still there now, that all this, including this conversation with you, is false and imaginary. Who are you, by the way? The absurd thing is that you don't know either...

They were sitting under a night sky. She was watching the nearby stars, while he was staring at the whole universe in her eyes.

It's often a matter of sitting in front of the computer and worrying. It's what writing comes down to--worrying that things aren't going to work out.

If you want to concentrate deeply on some problem, and especially some piece of writing or paper-work, you should acquire a cat. Alone with the cat in the room where you work ... the cat will invariably get up on your desk and settle placidly under the desk lamp ... The cat will settle down and be serene, with a serenity that passes all understanding. And the tranquility of the cat will gradually come to affect you, sitting there at your desk, so that all the excitable qualities that impede your concentration compose themselves and give your mind back the self-command it has lost. You need not watch the cat all the time. Its presence alone is enough. The effect of a cat on your concentration is remarkable, very mysterious.

The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who'll listen to me, is not to wait around for Inspirational. Inspirational is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you're sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspirational is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that's almost never the case.

Choking with dry tears and raging, raging, raging at the absolute indifference of nature and the world to the death of love, the death of hope and the death of beauty, I remember sitting on the end of my bed, collecting these pills and capsules together and wondering why, why when I felt I had so much to offer, so much love, such outpourings of love and energy to spend on the world, I was incapable of being offered love, giving it or summoning the energy with which I knew I could transform myself and everything around me.

"And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting

"...it is never safe to classify the souls of one's neighbors; one is apt, in the long run, to be proved a fool. You should regard each meeting with a friend as a sitting he is unwillingly giving you for a portrait -- a portrait that, probably, when you or he die, will still be unfinished. And, though this is an absorbing pursuit, nevertheless, the painters are apt to end pessimists. For however handsome and merry may be the face, however rich the background, in the first rough sketch of each portrait, yet with every added stroke of the brush, with every tiny readjustment of the 'values,' with every modification of the chiaroscuro, the eyes looking out at you grow more disquieting. And, finally, it is your

Everybody is a story. When I was a child, people sat around kitchen tables and told their stories. We don't do that so much anymore. Sitting around the table telling stories is not just a way of passing time. It is the way the wisdom gets passed along. The stuff that helps us to live a life worth remembering.

Every decision I have made - from changing jobs, to changing partners, to changing homes - has been taken with trepidation. I have not ceased being fearful, but I have ceased to let fear control me. I have accepted fear as a part of life, specifically the fear of change, the fear of the unknown, and I have gone ahead despite the pounding in the heart that says: turn back, turn back, you'll die if you venture too far... In the past several years I have learned, in short, to trust myself. Not to eradicate fear but to go on in spite of fear. Not to become insensitive to distinguished critics but to follow my own writer's instinct. My job is not to paralyze myself by anticipating judgment but to do the best that I can and let judgment fall where it may. The difference between the woman who is writing this essay and the college girl sitting in her creative writing class in 1961 is mostly a matter of nerve and daring - the nerve to trust my own instincts and the daring to be a fool. No one ever found wisdom without being a fool.

Probably the wisest words that were ever uttered to me. Came from a therapist. I was sitting in her office, crying my eyes out. . . and she said, "So let me get this straight. You base your personal happiness on things entirely out of your control.

Two people with mental issues in a relationship does not work. It's like sitting in a boat and neither one has an oar to row the other to shore. You can meet your mirror image in life, but that doesn't mean you should marry him.

A statue isn't built from the ground up -- it's chiseled out of a block of marble -- and I often wonder if we aren't likewise shaped by the qualities we lack, outlined by the empty space where the marble used to be. I'll be sitting on a train. I'll be lying awake in bed. I'll be watching a movie; I'll be laughing. And then, all of a sudden, I'll be struck with the paralyzing truth: It's not what we do that makes us who are. It's what we don't do that defines us.

Dodge, be honest. It's not close to over. You've been nursing this wound for nearly ten years, working it off over there in Afghanistan, trying to forget the girl you've loved since you were ten. There's no way this is over. There is so much bitterness sitting in your heart you can't even see it. But maybe that's why God brought you back - for her. And to set you free from all that darkness.

"Only a tiny chip of paint is missing from my most recent hit. But hey, if you value boring, unchipped doorframes and sloppy ball control, by all means, keep the soccer ball outside or sitting neglected in the garage for nine months out of the year.

Sitting in a bar, I drink a few pints and quarts, this is how poetry comes to me at times, and sometimes it wants me to chase her.

Never waste any amount of time doing anything important when there is a sunset outside that you should be sitting under!

In that moment, I understand the way that the noblest yearning for duty and sacrifice can be mixed up with all that is savage and shameful, like in the Bible, where a just and merciful God tells you to kill everyone, kill the children, kill the livestock, kill John Polling, leave nothing alive to sully this pure and just world. Except when it's all done you find out that wasn't really God after all, just some politician, or maybe it was God, but he taps you on the shoulder and says, 'No, dude, that isn't what I meant,' and leaves you sitting in a Dairy Queen in Bothell with blood on your hands and no further orders...

The cautious faith that never saws off a limb on which it is sitting, never learns that unattached limbs may find strange unaccountable ways of not falling.

Every Sunday I nudge Sam in her direction, and he walks to where she is sitting and hugs her. She smells him behind the ears, where he most smells like sweet unwashed new potatoes. This is in fact what I think God may smell like, a young child's slightly dirty neck.

I don't know what I believe anymore. If God does exist, then He's just an asshole, creating this world full of human suffering and letting all these terrible things happen to good people, and sitting there and doing nothing about it. At June's memorial service, a few people came up to me and said some really stupid things, like how everything happens for a reason, and God never gives us more than we can handle. All I could think was, does that mean if I was a weaker person, this never would've happened? Am I seriously supposed to buy that June's death was part of some stupid divine plan? I don't believe that. I can't. It just doesn't make sense.

All questions of right to one side, I have never been able to banish the queasy inner suspicion that Israel just did not look, or feel, either permanent or sustainable. I felt this when sitting in the old Ottoman courtyards of Jerusalem, and I felt it even more when I saw the hideous 'Fort Condo' settlements that had been thrown up around the city in order to give the opposite impression. If the statelet was only based on a narrow strip of the Mediterranean littoral (God having apparently ordered Moses to lead the Jews to one of the very few parts of the region with absolutely no oil at all), that would be bad enough. But in addition, it involved roosting on top of an ever-growing population that did not welcome the newcomers.

I learned that one person hurting another really is like a hand curling into a fist to smash the foot. And that all that really matters is family and other people. And that the purpose of life is to find the Light of God, but not the light from some old guy with a beard sitting up there judging us. The light is the love we give each other on our way back home. And that God wouldn't mind if we spent a little less time telling him how great he is and a little more time loving each other, and not just the people we're supposed to love, but everyone.

I think that must be a lot like how God has it--not to sound as if I think I'm anything like God, mind you. But the whole idea--sitting up there behind glass you can't be seen through. The person down below looks up and it's just a reflection of themselves, a mirror is what they see. But behind the glass, somebody who loves you more than anything is watching, and is hoping for the best for you, and cheering you on, and is loving you even when you are doing something you shouldn't be.