“Civilized Man says: I am Self, I am Master, all the rest is other–outside, below, underneath, subservient. I own, I use, I explore, I exploit, I control. What I do is what matters. What I want is what matter is for. I am that I am, and the rest is women & wilderness, to be used as I see fit.”

Things don’t have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What’s the function of a galaxy?

The only questions that really matter are the ones you ask yourself.

You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change.

Translation is entirely mysterious. Increasingly I have felt that the art of writing is itself translating, or more like translating than it is like anything else.

We will not know our own injustice if we cannot imagine justice. We will not be free if we do not imagine freedom.

Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.

The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.

To the lives that haven’t been lived yet. That will be my gift back to the world that gave me the life I did live, the love I loved, the breath I breathed.

All makers must leave room for the acts of the spirit. But they have to work hard and carefully, and wait patiently, to deserve them.

Those who build walls are their own prisoners.

The Earth is beautiful, and bright, and kindly, but that is not all. The Earth is also terrible, and dark, and cruel. The rabbit shrieks dying in the green meadows.

The story is not in the plot but in the telling.

Life goes on, even if two-headed and glowing faintly in the dark.

Our roots are in the dark; the earth is our country.

We read books to find out who we are.

All knowledge is local, all truth is partial. No truth can make another truth untrue. All knowledge is part of the whole knowledge.

Yet even under the most crushing state machinery courage rises up again and again, for fear is not the natural state of civilized man.

So much nearer to Nature than civilized men are; absurd then to maintain cruelty is a consequence of depravity. . . .

We are all civilized people, wich means that we are all savages at heart but observing a few amenities of civilized behaviour.

It seems to me the mark of a civilized society that certain privileges should be taken for granted such as education, health care and the safety to walk the streets.