The body of literature, with its limits and edges, exists outside some people and inside others. Only after the writer lets literature shape her can she perhaps shape literature.

The silence is all there is. It is the alpha and the omega, it is God's brooding over the face of the waters; it is the blinded note of the ten thousand things, the whine of wings. You take a step in the right direction to pray to this silence, and even to address the prayer to "World." Distinctions blur. Quit your tents. Pray without ceasing.

Trees have a curious relationship to the subject of the present moment. There are many created things in the universe that outlive us, that outlive the sun, even, but I can't think about them. I live with trees.

As a thinker I keep discovering that beauty itself is as much a fact, and a mystery...I consider nature's facts -- its beautiful and grotesque forms and events -- in terms of the import to thought and their impetus to the spirit. In nature I find grace tangled in a rapture with violence; I find an intricate landscape whose forms are fringed in death; I find mystery, newness, and a kind of exuberant, spendthrift energy.

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.

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.

I breathed the air of history all unaware, and walked oblivious through its littered layers.