191 quotes found
“Innocence is a better world.”
“You can't test courage cautiously.”
“The surest sign of age is loneliness.”
“So live. I'll be the nun for you. I am now.”
“The dedicated life is the life worth living.”
“Think of a globe, a revolving globe on a stand. Think of a contour globe, whose mountain ranges cast shadows, whose continents rise in bas-relief above the oceans. But then: think of how it really ...”
“What I aim to do is not so much learn the names of the shreds of creation that flourish in this valley, but to keep myself open to their meanings, which is to try to impress myself at all times wit...”
“The gaps are the thing. The gaps are the spirit's one home, the altitudes and latitudes so dazzlingly spare and clean that the spirit can discover itself like a once-blind man unbound. The gaps are...”
“When her doctor took her bandages off and led her into the garden, the girl who was no longer blind saw the tree with the lights in it. It was for this tree I searched through the peach orchards of...”
“Cruelty is a mystery, and the waste of pain. But if we describe a world to compass these things, a world that is a long, brute game, then we bump against another mystery: the inrush of power and li...”
“You cannot mend the chromosome, quell the earthquake, or stanch the flood. You cannot atone for the dead tyrants murders and you alone cannot stop living tyrants. As Martin Buber saw it, the world ...”
“The secret of seeing is, then the pearl of great price. If I thought he could teach me to find it and keep it forever I would stagger barefoot across a hundred deserts after any lunatic at all. But...”
“I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too. I am not washed and beautiful, in control of a shining world...”
“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. After a time you ...”
“Nature's silence is its one remark, and every flake of world is a chip off that old mute and immutable block.”
“It is difficult to undo our own damage, and to recall to our presence that which we have asked to leave. It is hard to desecrate a grove and change your mind. The very holy mountains are keeping mu...”
“In nature, improbabilities are the one stock in trade. The whole creation is one lunatic fringe. If creation had been left up to me, I'm sure I wouldn't have had the imagination or courage to do mo...”
“Were the earth smooth, our brains would be smooth as well; we would wake, blink, walk two steps to get the whole picture, and lapse into a dreamless sleep.”
“I chanced on a wonderful book by Marius von Senden, called Space and Sight. . . . For the newly sighted, vision is pure sensation unencumbered by meaning: "The girl went through the experience that...”
“Today is one of those excellent January partly cloudies in which light chooses an unexpected part of the landscape to trick out in gilt, and then the shadow sweeps it away. You know youre alive. Yo...”
“Mountains are giant, restful, absorbent. You can heave your spirit into a mountain and the mountain will keep it, folded, and not throw it back as some creeks will. The creeks are the world with al...”
“Unfortunately, nature is very much a now-you-see-it, now-you-don't affair. A fish flashes, then dissolves in the water before my eyes like so much salt. Deer apparently ascend bodily into heaven, t...”
“That its rough out there and chancy is no surprise. Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac. But at the same time we are also created. In the Koran, Allah asks the he...”
“We can stage our own act on the planet-build our cities on its plains, dam its rivers, plant its topsoils-but our meaningful activity scarcely covers the terrain. We do not use the songbirds, for i...”
“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
