We were going to leave a mark on the world but instead the world left marks on us.

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.

I came to parenting the way most of us do - knowing nothing and trying to learn everything.

A likely impossibility is always preferable to an unconvincing possibility.

I'm the kind of person that thinks that you should get what you deserve in what you show, with actions, not with words.

Trees have feelings too, and no one ever says 'hi' to them. Next time you're outside and see a tree, say 'hello'.

The Order of the Arrow is a thing of the outdoors rather than the indoors. It was born in an island wilderness. It needs the sun and rain, the woods and the plains, the waters and the starlit sky.

We all get a little tired of being ourselves sometimes. The answer is to reinvent yourself, but how do you do that and what is the cost?

I didn't like where I once was, so I promised myself I wouldn't be back there.

Fidelity is for phonographs

And funerals are pretty compared to deaths.

It sounds so stupid, so basic, but when you are really in a grateful state, you are like a magnet for joy.