“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...”

“My arrivalHer wombs delightHer existenceMy living lightHer woundsMy scarsHer skiesMy starsHer daysMy hoursHer strengthMy powersI breathe my name Being her childWithout motherLifes beguiledFrom the ...”

“Arrival in the world is really a departure and that, which we call departure, is only a return.”

“That (labyrinth)...became a world whose rules I lived by, and I understood the moral of mazes: sometimes you have to turn your back on your goal to get there, sometimes you're farthest away when yo...”

“The term "work" is getting thrown around as though everyone seems to be doing so. The question is, working for what? Every time I am at work, it means I am getting closer to my goal. Once you have ...”

“Success, like happiness, is a by-product, not a goal.”

“Be grateful for what you already have while you pursue your goals. If you arent grateful for what you already have, what makes you think you would be happy with more.”

“A man craves ultimate truths. Every mortal mind, I think, is that way. But what is ultimate truth? It's the end of the road, where there is no more mystery, no more hope. And no more questions to a...”

“He stands alone in hollow gloom, with the sound of his own breath whispering down unseen passages ahead and behind and to both sides, wondering how he stumbled into this blackest of all labyrinths....”

“You mentioned . . . one of the two great labyrinths into which the mind is drawn. What . . . is the other?""The other is the composition of the continuum, or: what is space?”