It's no wonder human beings are so narcissistic. The way our ears are constructed, we can hear only what is right next to us or else the internal monologue inside.

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.

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

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.

The reason I talk to myself is because I’m the only one whose answers I accept.

One word frees us of all the weight and pain of life: That word is love.

What is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?

There is not such a cradle of democracy upon the earth as the Free Public Library, this republic of letters, where neither rank, office, nor wealth receives the slightest consideration.

We use the word 'organization' to mean both the state of being organized and the groups that do the organizing.

The bigotry question goes both ways. There's a lot more anti-Christian bigotry today than there is concerning the other side. None of it gets covered by the news media.

Quit Iraq Study Group to avoid politicizing it.

Skiers make the best lovers because they don't sit in front of a television like couch potatoes. They take a risk and they wiggle their behinds. They also meet new people on the ski lift.

Remedying the deficiencies of seminary curricula is a difficult question because of all kinds of vested political interests long at work in the building of any curriculum.

"More than him has done that," said Antonia sadly, and the girls murmured assent.