I don't know what it is about fecundity that so appalls. I suppose it is the teeming evidence that birth and growth, which we value, are ubiquitous and blind, that life itself is so astonishingly cheap, that nature is as careless as it is bountiful, and that with extravagance goes a crushing waste that will one day include our own cheap lives.

Silence is not our heritage but our destiny; we live where we want to live.

There were no formerly heroic times, and there was no formerly pure generation. There is no one here but us chickens, and so it has always been.

Landscape consists in the multiple, overlapping intricacies and forms that exist in a given space at a moment in time.

The mind wants the world to return its love, or its awareness; the mind wants to know all the world, and all eternity, and God.

Write as if you are dying.

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.