“When someone doesn't show up, the people who wait sometimes tell stories about what might have happened and come to half believe the desertion, the abduction, the accident. Worry is a way to preten...”

“In her novel Regeneration, Pat Barker writes of a doctor who 'knew only too well how often the early stages of change or cure may mimic deterioration. Cut a chrysalis open, and you will find a rott...”

“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 ...”

“Perhaps walking is best imagined as an 'indicator species,' to use an ecologist's term. An indicator species signifies the health of an ecosystem, and its endangerment or diminishment can be an ear...”

“[In mountaineering, if] we look for private experience rather than public history, even getting to the top becomes an optional narrative rather than the main point, and those who only wander in hig...”

“The famous Zen parable about the master for whom, before his studies, mountains were only mountains, but during his studies mountains were no longer mountains, and afterward mountains were again mo...”

“Without energy being invested in resisting the unwanted or dueling with fears, we have more energy and attention available for noticing not only the disturbing, but the wonderful...When we are not ...”

“Despite all the identifying, measuring, photographing, I had managed to set the experience in a kind of present past, a having looked, even as I was temporally and physically still looking...It is ...”

“A person must make peace with oneself before they will find peace with the world.”

“Let us not project our own spiritual limitations onto the modern world, for it is not the world which prevents us from being religious. The kind of world we live in shapes the manner and mode of ou...”

“The death of God left the angels in a strange position.”

“We've inherited many ideas about writing that emerged in the eighteenth century, especially an interest in literature as both an expression and an exploration of the self. This development part of...”

“I know. I was there. I saw the great void in your soul, and you saw mine.”

“Habit rules the unreflecting herd.”

“Not everyone born free and equal, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against. So! A b...”