Old memories are very easy to get except that once you write about something you've destroyed it.

An Inuit hunter asked the local missionary priest: If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell? No, said the priest, not if you did not know. Then why, asked the Inuit earnestly, did you tell me?

Johnston's books are beautifully written and among the funniest I have ever read.

When I walk with a camera, I walk from shot to shot, reading the light on a calibrated meter. When I walk without a camera, my own shutter opens, and the moment's light prints on my own silver gut. When I see this second way I am above all an unscrupulous observer.

Nature's silence is its one remark, and every flake of world is a chip off that old mute and immutable block.

Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed?

Time is the warp and matter the weft of the woven texture of beauty in space, and death is the hurling shuttle.