“Nature is, above all, profligate.”

I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.

There are no events but thoughts and the heart’s hard turning, the heart’s slow learning where to love and whom. The rest is merely gossip, and tales for other times.

Art is like an ill-trained Labrador retriever that drags you out into traffic.

I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as a dying friend. I hold its hand and hope it will get better.

Mountains are giant, restful, absorbent. You can heave your spirit into a mountain and the mountain will keep it, folded, and not throw it back as some creeks will. The creeks are the world with all its stimulus and beauty; I live there. But the mountains are home.

Nature’s silence is its one remark, and every flake of world is a chip off that old mute and immutable block.

At a certain point, you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world, Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive. You empty yourself and wait, listening.

The world knew you before you knew the world.

Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery.

The secret is not to write about what you love best, but about what you, alone, love at all.

These are our few live seasons. Let us live them as purely as we can, in the present.

The extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation.

I break up through the skin of awareness a thousand times a day, as dolphins burst through seas, and dive again, and rise, and dive.

I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn’t flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames.

Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac.

You’ve got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.

The dream is the liberation of the spirit from the pressure of external nature, a detachment of the soul from the fetters of matter.

Some people have no idea what they’re doing, and a lot of them are really good at it.

All my life through, the new sights of nature made me rejoice like a child.

People run from rain but sit in bathtubs full of water.

It is the nature of truth in general, as of some ores in particular, to be richest when most superficial.

Human nature fascinates me.

Man selects only for his own good: Nature only for that of the being which she tends.

The real and proper question is: why is it beautiful