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

The attempt to close the gap between what is known and what IS, is the temptation behind the apple in Genesis.

The gaze of the wolf reached into our soul.

There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions.

I know of no restorative of heart, body, and soul more effective against hopelessness than the restoration of the Earth.

The wolf exerts a powerful influence on the human imagination. It takes your stare and turns it back on you

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

The interior landscape responds to the character and subtlety of the exterior landscape; the shape of the individual mind is affected by the land as it is by genes.

Would the last animal, eating garbage and living on the last scrap of land, his mate dead, would he still forgive you?

Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive.

It is the imagination that gives shape to the universe.

People think that if you’ve written a book and somebody’s given you a pat on the back then, you know, it’s all – you’re all settled, you know? You’re going to be fine. I know that if I’m not confused, and really afraid, my work isn’t going to be any good.

My function as a writer is to provide an atmosphere in which people can think wisely about what we’re doing on this planet.

The most intelligent thing we can do is love, not reason.

One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse.

Have we come all this way, I wondered, only to be dismantled by our own technologies, to be betrayed by political connivance or the impersonal avarice of a corporation?

We cannot, of course, save the World because we do not have authority over its parts. We can serve the world though. That is everyone’s calling, to lead a life that helps.

It was the last time she’d see the river from that window. The last time of anything has the poignancy of death itself. This that I see now, she thought, to see no more this way.

You are a mischievous one. You will cause no end of trouble. You have to travel many roads before you find the river of your destiny. This life of yours will be full of riddles. You will be protected and you will never be alone.

In the beginning there was a river. The river became a road and the road branched out to the whole world. And because the road was once a river it was always hungry.

THE HOT (AND SERIOUSLY COOL) ENERGY that comes from the musical gospel preached by the title character of FELA! feels as if it could stretch easily to the borders of Manhattan and then across a river or two. There should be dancing in the streets!

We are on the Colorado — that means something more to me than electric power or a harnessed river.

Have we come all this way, I wondered, only to be dismantled by our own technologies, to be betrayed by political connivance or the impersonal avarice of a corporation?

River is time in water; as it came, still so it flows, yet never is the same.

We have forgotten how to be good guests, how to walk lightly on the earth as its other creatures do.