“Maybe happiness too is a metaphor invented on a day of boredom”

“At other times, at the edge of a wood, especially at dusk, the trees themselves would assume strange shapes: sometimes they were arms rising heavenwards, , or else the trunk would twist and turn li...”

“It would have been better to do what everyone else does, neither taking life too seriously nor seeing it as merely grotesque, choosing a profession and practicing it, grabbing one's share of the co...”

“There comes a point at which you stop writing and think all the more”

“In his earliest youth, he had drawn inspiration from really bad authors, as you may have seen from his style; as he grew older, he lost his taste for them, but the excellent authors just didnt fill...”

“We think of women at every age: while still children, we fondle with a nave sensuality the breasts of those grown-up girls kissing us and cuddling us in their arms; at the age of ten, we dream of l...”

“Yet it isn't the gold that I'm wantingSo much as just finding the gold.It's the great, big, broad land 'way up yonder,It's the forests where silence has lease;It's the beauty that thrills me with w...”

“All forests are one... They are all echoes of the first forest that gave birth to Mystery when the world began.”

“When her mother combed Harriet's hair, she said that the woods were disgustingly muddy and mosquito-ridden. During her history unit on pioneers, her father bashfully admitted that he couldn't pitch...”

“When nations resort to arms, the human spirit is like a bird that cannot stand to hear its own song.”

“There is not a fragment in all nature, for every relative fragment of one thing is a full harmonious unit in itself.”

“There is no wisdom for a man without harmony, and without harmony there is no contemplation. Without contemplation there cannot be peace, and without peace can there be joy?”

“We are looking for a tongue that speaks with reverence for life, searching for an ecology of mind. Without it, we have no home, no place of our own within the creation. It is not only the vocabular...”

“But Sasha was from Russia, where the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden and sentences are often left unfinished from doubt as how to best end them.”

“Why the Egyptian, Arabic, Abyssinian, Choctaw? Well, what tongue does the wind talk? What nationality is a storm? What country do rains come from? What color is lightning? Where does thunder goe wh...”