There is nothing in nature that can't be taken as a sign of both mortality and invigoration.

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.

I wasn't concerned, but I was thinking that the fastest way to get your mind off him and on me would be to tell you something truly appalling about him.

Before Elijah could raise a nation from the dead, he raised just one dead child.

I never really thought of myself as depressed so much as paralyzed by hope.

Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.

The Lord takes care of his own, but church trustees still put lightning rods on the steeple.

Fall in love with someone who truly deserves your heart. Not with someone who plays with it.

If the rich could hire others to die for them we, the poor, would all make a nice living.

Zen culture invites us to experience reality without the intervening distractions of intellect, categories, analysis.

All religious wars are about people arguing over who has the biggest invisible friend.