“There is, in every event, whether lived or told, always a hole or a gap, often more than one. If we allow ourselves to get caught in it, we find it opening onto a void that, once we have slipped into it, we can never escape.”

Also quoted in The Heart of Goodness : A Radiant Path to a Richer, Fuller Life (1999) by Jo Ann Larsen
Living Under Tension (1941)
Context: No horse gets anywhere until he is harnessed. No stream or gas drives anything until it is confined. No Niagara is ever turned into light and power until it is tunneled. No life ever grows great until it is focused, dedicated, disciplined. One of the widest gaps in human experience is the gap between what we say we want to be and our willingness to discipline ourselves to get there.

Paul Tanner, in "Free Women: 1"<!-- p. 173 -->
The Golden Notebook (1962)
Context: We spend our lives fighting to get people very slightly more stupid than ourselves to accept truths that the great men have always known. They have known for thousands of years that to lock a sick person into solitary confinement makes him worse. They have known for thousands of years that a poor man who is frightened of his landlord and of the police is a slave. They have known it. We know it. But do the great enlightened mass of the British people know it? No. It is our task, Ella, yours and mine, to tell them. Because the great men are too great to be bothered. They are already discovering how to colonise Venus and to irrigate the moon. That is what is important for our time. You and I are the boulder-pushers. All our lives, you and I, we’ll put all our energies, all our talents into pushing a great boulder up a mountain. The boulder is the truth that the great men know by instinct, and the mountain is the stupidity of mankind.

Biographia Literaria, introduction (1906).

Source: The Captain is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship

Interview on Entertainment Tonight, as quoted in "Oprah Winfrey Offers Words of Wisdom in Wake of Deadly Las Vegas Shooting", KTVB (2 October 2017)

son
[harv, June 30, 2005, 2005, http://www.vac-acc.gc.ca/remembers/sub.cfm?source=history/other/native/peaceful, Native Soldiers - Foreign Battlefields, Veterans Affairs Canada, 2010-05-11, Veterans Affairs Canada]

Source: In the Belly of the Beast: Letters From Prison