What Flaubert refers to as the “mélancholies du voyage” is like the sadness I feel as one season departs and another arrives.

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.

Those with the least always lose the most in war.

I don't really believe in rules, but I do like old-fashioned dating where you don't call the guy until he calls you. I don't think it's like he's got to do this and that's the rule.

Arabs and Mulims are not terrorists.The world should unite against Israel.

I tried to pay some small tribute to A Man and a Woman (1966) with the recurring musical theme.

I remember when I was a kid I used to come home from Sunday School and my mother would get drunk and try to make pancakes

One lady wrote me and told me how she wants to see me get beat up and near death and that kind of stuff.

John Kerry met with Ralph Nader last week. Both sides of every issue were discussed. And then, Nader spoke.

It's always fun watching new actors and new voices come out.

Robert Benchley has a style that is weak and lies down frequently to rest.

True religion comes not front the teaching of men or the reading of books; it is the awakening of the spirit within us, consequent upon pure and heroic action.