The point of going somewhere like the Napo River in Ecuador is not to see the most spectacular anything. It is simply to see what is there.

Love so sprang at her, she honestly thought no one had ever looked into it. Where was it in literature? Someone would have written something. She must not have recognized it. Time to read everything again.

I saw in a blue haze all the world poured flat and pale between the mountains

Like everyone in his right mind, I feared Santa Claus.

How you spend your days is how you spend your life.

The point of the dragonfly's terrible lip, the giant water bug, birdsong, or the beautiful dazzle and flash of sunlighted minnows,is not that it all fits together like clockwork--for it doesn'tbut that it all flows so freely wild, like the creek, that it all surges in such a free, finged tangle. Freedom is the world's water and weather, the world's nourishment freely given, its soil and sap: and the creator loves pizzazz.

The mountains are great stone bells; they clang together like nuns. Who shushed the stars? There are a thousand million galaxies easily seen in the Palomar reflector; collisions between and among them do, of course, occur. But these collisions are very long and silent slides. Billions of stars sift amont each other untouched, too distant even to be moved, heedless as always, hushed. The sea pronounces something, over and over, in a hoarse whisper; I cannot quite make it out. But God knows I have tried.