“I am not bound for any public place, but for ground of my own where I have planted vines and orchard trees, and in the heat of the day climbed up into the healing shadow of the woods.”

Industrial agriculture characteristically proceeds by single solutions to single problems: If you want the most money from your land this year, grow the crops for which the market price is highest.

There are no sacred and unsacred places; there are only sacred and desecrated places.

The primary motive for good care and good use of the land-community is always going to be affection, which is too often lacking.

To hear of a thousand deaths in war is terrible, and we ‘know’ that it is. But as it registers on our hearts, it is not more terrible than one death fully imagined.

The past is our definition. We may strive with good reason to escape it, or to escape what is bad in it. But we will escape it only by adding something better to it.

And if we offend gravely enough against what we know to be true, as by failing badly enough to deal affectionately and responsibly with our land and our neighbors, truth will retaliate with ugliness, poverty, and disease.

Urban conservationists may feel entitled to be unconcerned about food production because they are not farmers. But they can’t be let off so easily, for they are all farming by proxy.

I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief…

The fertility cycle is a cycle entirely of living creatures passing again and again through birth, growth, maturity, death, and decay.

Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes.

I was a bright boy and I ought to make something out of myself… something else that would be a cut or two above my humble origins.

I’m a writer more than I am a talker.

We cannot comprehend what comprehends us.

When you are new at sheep-raising and your ewe has a lamb, your impulse is to stay there and help it nurse and see to it and all. After a while, you know that the best thing you can do is walk out of the barn.

A longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.

The ecosystems, the ecosphere, those are good gifts.

Any one prominent in affairs can always see when a man may steal a horse and when a man may not look over a hedge.

One cannot demand of art that it pay you in any other way than in the satisfaction of the work itself.

I do not believe in any religion, I will have nothing to do with immortality. We are miserable enough in this life without speculating upon another.

That’s why this generation is the least racist generation ever. You see it all the time. Go to any club.

I have no idea where I want to go musically, but I’m fine that way. I don’t need to be faithful to any concept, you know.

I don’t let any personal views about religion cause me to want to take away something that’s offering the patient comfort.

I don’t think any rapper can go back. You can be a car salesman, a bank teller – I mean, really good jobs, and people are still gonna look at you and be like, ‘You used to rap; what happened?’

I don’t want any title. I just say what I say, and hopefully somebody gets it, man. I’m not perfect, and I’m just here and trying to make a dollar, and being real at the same time, you know?