My wish simply is to live my life as fully as I can. In both our work and our leisure, I think, we should be so employed. And in our time this means that we must save ourselves from the products that we are asked to buy in order, ultimately, to replace ourselves.
Always in the big woods when you leave familiar ground and step off alone into a new place there will be, along with the feelings of curiosity and excitement, a little nagging of dread. It is the ancient fear of the Unknown, and it is your first bond with the wilderness you are going into.
If the devil doesn’t exist... how do you explain that some people are a lot worse than they’re smart enough to be?
We weren’t allowing our hopes to become expectations. Expectations are tempting, pleasant, maybe necessary. They are scary too, once you have had some experience. They are not necessarily and not always a bucket of smoke, but they can be and are even likely to be.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.
He imagines a necessary joy in things that must fly to eat.
He loved the woods, where it seemed to him that every life was secret, including his own.
This religion that scorned the beauty and goodness of this world was a puzzle to me.
Geese appear high over us, pass, and the sky closes. Abandon, as in love or sleep, holds them to their way, clear in the ancient faith: what we need is here. And we pray, not for new earth or heaven, but to be quiet in heart, and in eye, clear. What we need is here.
A good community, in other words, is a good local economy.
The river’s injury is its shape.
Education has increasingly been reduced to job training, preparing young people not for responsible adulthood and citizenship but for expert servitude to the corporations.
A music attends the things of the earth. To sense that music is to be near the possibility of health and joy.
This is the man who will be my grandfather – the man who will be the man who was my grandfather. The tenses slur and slide under the pressure of collapsed time.
For what seemed a long time Mat knelt there with his father’s dead wrist in his hand, while his mind arrived and arrived and yet arrived at that place and time and that body lying still on the soiled and bloodied stones.