One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse.

You can't learn anything from saguaro cactus, from ocotillo. They are just passing through; their roots, their much heralded dormancy in the dry season, these are only illusions of permanence. They know even less than you do.

Would the last animal, eating garbage and living on the last scrap of land, his mate dead, would he still forgive you?

Over the years, one comes to measure a place, too, not just for the beauty it may give, the balminess of its breezes, the insouciance and relaxation it encourages, the sublime pleasures it offers, but for what it teaches. The way in which it alters our perception of the human. It is not so much that you want to return to indifferent or difficult places, but that you want to not forget.

To put your hands in a river is to feel the chords that bind the earth together.

The land gets inside of us; and we must decide one way or another what this means, what we will do about it.

The land is like poetry: it is inexplicably coherent, it is transcendent in its meaning, and it has the power to elevate a consideration of human life.