They are all beasts of burden in a sense, ′ Thoreau once remarked of animals, ‘made to carry some portion of our thoughts.’ Animals are the old language of the imagination; one of the ten thousand tragedies of their disappearance would be a silencing of this speech.
I told the students that they were at the age when they might begin to choose places that would sustain them the rest of their lives, that places were more reliable than human beings, and often much longer-lasting, and I asked them where they felt at home.
The possibility of paradise hovers on the cusp of coming into being, so much so that it takes powerful forces to keep such a paradise at bay. If paradise now arises in hell, it’s because in the suspension of the usual order and the failure of most systems, we are free to live and act another way.
Now, wilderness can be seen as a useful fiction, a fiction constructed by John Muir and his heirs and deployed to keep places from being destroyed by resource extraction and wholesale development.
A procession is a participants’ journey, while a parade is a performance with an audience.
This is the strange life of books that you enter along as a writer, mapping an unknown territory that arises as you travel. If you succeed in the voyage, others enter after, one at a time, also alone, but in communion with your imagination, traversing your route. Books are solitudes where we meet.
Many love stories are like the shells of hermit crabs, though others are more like chambered nautiluses, whose architecture grows with the inhabitant and whose abandoned smaller chambers are lighter than water and let them float in the sea.
Much fuss has been made over the idea of the frontier, as though it were a line advancing east to west, but the West was settled piece meal, and Indians fled in many directions to escape the tightening noose of the railroad lines and towns.
But fear of making mistakes can itself become a huge mistake, one that prevents you from living, for life is risky and anything less is already a loss.
Earlier 18th-century literary language was not supple enough to connect the life of the imagination to that of the street.
Time always wins; our victories are only delays; but delays are sweet, and a delay can last a whole lifetime.
To feel for someone enlarges the self and then the self shares risks and pains.
We live inside each other’s thoughts and works.
Some music has words, and rock had words that at times aspired to poetry, but the words were always sounds first, spoken to the body before the mind.
To me, the grounds for hope are simply that we don’t know what will happen next, and that the unlikely and the unimaginable happen quite regularly.
Many events plant seeds, imperceptible at the time, that bear fruit long afterward.
Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go.
A book is a heart that only beats in the chest of another.
Worry is a way to pretend that you have knowledge or control over what you don’t – and it surprises me, even in myself, how much we prefer ugly scenarios to the pure unknown.
To be hopeful means to be uncertain about the future, to be tender toward possibilities, to be dedicated to change all the way down to the bottom of your heart.