“This, I thought, is what is meant by ‘thy will be done’ in the Lord’s Prayer, which I had prayed time and again without thinking about it.”

For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

The atmosphere, the earth, the water and the water cycle – those things are good gifts.

It means that your will and God’s will may not be the same. It means there’s a good possibility that you won’t get what you pray for. It means that in spite of your prayers you are going to suffer.

Prayer is like lying awake at night, afraid, with your head under the cover, hearing only the beating of your own heart.

We have to regard them as gifts because we couldn’t make them. We have to regard them as good gifts because we couldn’t live without them.

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.

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.

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.

No man wants to settle down. It happens. Eventually you’re going to bump into somebody that makes you go, ‘Hmm, I don’t mind seeing this person every day.’

Maybe subconsciously I feel I was meant to work hard for a living.

I feel like whatever is meant is meant. I feel like this is already written.

That it is meant to be discarded: that the whole point is to always see it as a soap bubble?

In the end such a breach of trust and confidence meant that I had no option but to leave.

They were soon to emigrate to Canada, and the aerial ride was meant to be a last view of their beloved England.

My heart is at ease knowing that what was meant for me will never miss me, and that what misses me was never meant for me.

What they have forgotten they have forgotten: what they meant to do instead of fall is not in earth or time recoverable the fossils of intention, the shapes of rot.