An Eskimo shaman said, Life’s greatest danger lies in the fact that man’s food consists entirely of souls.
The world knew you before you knew the world.
We are here on the planet only once, and might as well get a feel for the place.
At a certain point, you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world, Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive. You empty yourself and wait, listening.
No one escapes the wilderness on the way to the promised land.
The dedicated life is worth living. You must give with your whole heart.
The sense impressions of one-celled animals are not edited for the brain. This is philosophically interesting in a rather mournful way, since it means that only the simplest animals perceive the universe as it is.
I alternate between thinking of the planet as home – dear and familiar stone hearth and garden – and as a hard land of exile in which we are all sojourners.
The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.
I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.
Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.
The sea pronounces something, over and over, in a hoarse whisper; I cannot quite make it out.
Ecstasy, I think, is a soul’s response to the waves holiness makes as it nears.
We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence...
She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.
You can’t test courage cautiously.
I feel as though I stand at the foot of an infinitely high staircase, down which some exuberant spirit is flinging tennis ball after tennis ball, eternally, and the one thing I want in the world is a tennis ball.
Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed?
Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark.
We live in all we seek.