“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.”

The dedicated life is worth living. You must give with your whole heart.

We are most deeply asleep at the switch when we fancy we control any switches at all.

The sea pronounces something, over and over, in a hoarse whisper; I cannot quite make it out.

Adverbs are a sign that you’ve used the wrong verb.

You can serve or you can sing, and wreck your heart in prayer, working the world’s hard work.

We live in all we seek.

He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write. He is careful of what he learns, for that is what he will know.

Wherever we go, there seems to be only one business at hand – that of finding a workable compromise between the sublimity of our ideas and the absurdity of the fact of us.

One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time – give it, give it all, give it now.

No one escapes the wilderness on the way to the promised land.

Write about winter in the summer.

I wake expectant, hoping to see a new thing.

The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less.

I cannot cause light; the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam. It is possible, in deep space, to sail on solar wind. Light, be it particle or wave, has force: you rig a giant sail and go. The secret of seeing is to sail on solar wind.

Caring passionately about something isn’t against nature, and it isn’t against human nature. It’s what we’re here to do.

You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then-and only then-it is handed to you.