I like big, open, spare landscapes. There's lots of room. Nobody bothers you... I feel as if I can think there.

To rise above treeline is to go above thought, and after, the descent back into bird song, bog orchids, willows, and firs is to sink into the preliterate parts of ourselves.

Everything in nature invites us constantly to be what we are.

To trace the history of a river . . . is to trace the history of the soul, the history of the mind descending and arising in the body.

A tree is a thought, an obstruction stopping the flow of wind and light, trapping water, housing insects, birds, and animals, and breathing in and out. How treelike the human, how human the tree.

Everything in nature invites us constantly to be what we are. We are often like rivers: careless and forceful, timid and dangerous, lucid and muddied, eddying, gleaming, still.

I thought: to be tough is to be fragile; to be tender is to be truly fierce.

Leaves are verbs that conjugate the seasons.

Honesty is stronger medicine than sympathy, which may console but often conceals.

Finally, the lessons of impermanence taught me this: loss constitutes an odd kind of fullness; despair empties out into an unquenchable appetite for life.

Walking is also an ambulation of mind.

The oligarchs do not care what justice is, only what seems just. They do not care what mercy is, only what appears merciful. Thus justice and mercy will always escape them.

Having not said anything the first time, it was somehow even more difficult to broach the subject the second time around.

The longer I don't write, the more I hurt.

When there is no feeling of accomplishment children fail to develop properly and old people rapidly decline.

A woman is a foreign land.

Faith allows me to feel that as long as I'm in line with God everything will be O.K. and that I'll make it through whatever.

Growing up in a New Jersey suburb, my Catholic faith was an important part of my young life, shaping the way I approached the world.

If it wasn't for the women's movement, I wouldn't be where I am today.

Everything I do is in the gym so I'm always in gym clothes.

To discover the real you, look at what you spend time thinking about when no one is looking.