I would say Gary Snyder, who is from my part of the world as a poet and environmental thinker, will be read just as Henry Thoreau as John Muir will continue to be read.

It's hell writing and it's hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.

Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings, saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

Take the time to write. You can do your life's work in half an hour a day.

Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances.

Poetry is a fireplace in summer or a fan in winter.

If you're imaginatively responsible to the place you live in, you understand the watershed.

The birds are silent in the woods. / Just wait: soon enough / You will be quiet too

Imagination runs through the places where we live like water. We need both things-a living knowledge of the land and a live imagination of it and our place in it- if we are going to preserve it.

Repetition makes us feel secure and variation makes us feel free.

Writing is an incessant process of discovery.

There was nothing else in the entire universe, nothing but the two of them together. Her curves, his angles. Her light, his darkness. Her softness, his exquisitely aching hardness. Male. Female.

A man is a critic when he cannot be an artist, in the same way that a man becomes an informer when he cannot be a soldier.

Historically, much of the motivation for public schooling has been to stifle variety and institute social control.

National discord is, like religion, a standardized form of revolt; and the moment a revolt is standardized, it is no longer a revolt.

If geniuses can sometimes make mistakes, cannot the rest of us on occasion be geniuses?

Man, being reasonable, must get drunk; the best of life is but intoxication.

Knowledge is the only kind of wealth that multiplies when you give it away.

Our beliefs can move us forward in life, or they can hold us back.

[The currency of being celebrity] used to be only the elect had any manna in the information society and everyone else was a consumer.

Integrity is hard work. I do think the Internet makes it harder because of the temptations of performance. You can perform and have integrity, but it's easier just to perform.