In fiction I think we should have no agenda but to tell the truth.

National parks are the best idea we ever had. Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst.

We simply need that wild country available to us... For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.

You have to get over the color green; you have to quit associating beauty with gardens and lawns; you have to get used to an inhuman scale; you have to understand geological time.

Whatever landscape a child is exposed to early on, that will be the sort of gauze through which he or she will see all the world afterwards.

Be proud of every scar on your heart, each one holds a lifetime’s worth of lessons.

She had rooms in her mind that she would not look into.

Wisdom. . .is knowing what you have to accept.

Hard writing makes easy reading.

Some are born in their place, some find it, some realize after long searching that the place they left is the one they have been searching for.

Every green natural place we save saves a fragment of our sanity and gives us a little more hope that we have a future.

Whether your pleasing or pissing everybody off, your doing something wrong.

It is not you as the ego who moves through life, but that life flows before you, and you are the immutable awareness containing it all.

Strong thoughts are accompanied by great emotions

I am a result of what has happened on this planet - how could I find the art to say that? I can't, and yet, I am drawn to it because of the enormity of it. That seems really important.

Doing good doesn't always make you feel good. I don't care what they tell you in church.

The bottomless bitter misery of childhood: how little even now it is understood. Probably no adult misery can be compared with a child's despair.

Nothing draws a crowd quite like a crowd.

I have to think hard to name an interesting man who does not drink.

The activity you're most avoiding contains your biggest opportunity

We should be as careful of the books we read, as of the company we keep. The dead very often have more power than the living.