“One learns a landscape finally not by knowing the name or identity of everything in it, but by perceiving the relationships in it--like that between the sparrow and the twig. The difference between...”

“Imagine a forty-five-year-old male fifty feet long, a slim, shiny black animal cutting the surface of green ocean water at twenty knots. At fifty tons it is the largest carnivore on earth. Imagine ...”

“A thought that stayed with me was that I had entered a private place in the earth. I had seen exposed nearly its oldest part. I had lost my sense of urgency, rekindled a sense of what people were, ...”

“I think of two landscapes- one outside the self, the other within. The external landscape is the one we see-not only the line and color of the land and its shading at different times of the day, bu...”

“I do not know, really, how we will survive without places like the Inner Gorge of the Grand Canyon to visit. Once in a lifetime, even, is enough. To feel the stripping down, an ebb of the press of ...”

“All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered.”

“We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. And this has been based on the even flimsier assumption that we could know with any certainty what was good ev...”

“Each time you happen to me all over again.”

“Creativity is the state of consciousness in which you enter into the treasury of your innermost being and bring the beauty into manifestation. (p.232)”

“Do you think I'm pretty?I think you're beautifulBeautiful?You are so beautiful, it hurts sometimes.”

“As if you were on fire from within.The moon lives in the lining of your skin.”

“As dawn leaks into the sky it edits out the stars like excess punctuation marks, deleting asterisks and periods, commas, and semi-colons, leaving only unhinged thoughts rotating and pivoting, and u...”

“I pace the shallow sea, walking the time between, reflecting on the type of fossil Id like to be. I guess Id like my bones to be replaced by some vivid chert, a red ulna or radius, or maybe preserv...”

“It seemed everything that had ever lived and died in this world had passed through here, had left its indelible imprint.”