“Throughout the centuries we have projected on to the wolf the qualities we most despise and fear in ourselves.”

My faith is in my colleagues. And when I meet other writers, journalists, who’ve been doing this for a long time, trying to make us aware of what it is that we’re living in, I put my faith in those people.

The land urges us to come around to an understanding of ourselves.

In behaving respectfully toward all that the land contains, it is possible to imagine a stifling ignorance falling away from us.

There’s so much to be afraid of.

The land is like poetry: it is inexplicably coherent, it is transcendent in its meaning, and it has the power to elevate a consideration of human life.

The land gets inside of us; and we must decide one way or another what this means, what we will do about it.

For so many centuries, the exchange of gifts has held us together. It has made it possible to bridge the abyss where language struggles.

The opposite of love is not hate; it’s indifference. To be indifferent is to not express love.

I lay there knowing something eerie ties us to the world of animals. Sometimes the animals pull you backward into it. You share hunger and fear with them like salt in blood.

You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.

If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such paradox.

It does not demean men to want to be what they imagine the wolf to be, but it does demean them to kill the animal for it.

To put your hands in a river is to feel the chords that bind the earth together.

You can’t learn anything from saguaro cactus, from ocotillo. They are just passing through; their roots, their much heralded dormancy in the dry season, these are only illusions of permanence. They know even less than you do.

We simply do not understand our place in the universe and have not the courage to admit it.

One of the great dreams of man must be to find some place between the extremes of nature and civilization where it is possible to live without regret.

The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich.

For centuries it was never discovered that education was a function of the State, and the State never attempted to educate.

Are not laws dangerous which inhibit the passions? Compare the centuries of anarchy with those of the strongest legalism in any country you like and you will see that it is only when the laws are silent that the greatest actions appear.

At all times, in every century, every age, there has been such a connection between despotism and religion that it is infinitely apparent and demonstrated a thousand times over, that in destroying one, the other must be undermined.

I don’t like to badmouth people. But I’m the head of a monarchy that began in the ninth century, and I’m apparently more modern than Chris Christie.

Sure of itself, it bullies other civilizations, as a traveling salesman in a brown derby conquers the wisdom of China and tacks advertisements of cigarettes over arches for centuries dedicated to the sayings of Confucius.

Fascism is a religion. The twentieth century will be known in history as the century of Fascism.

Sometimes I think too much fuss is made about marriage. Century after century of carnal embracement and we’re still no nearer to understanding one another.