There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions.

The interior landscape responds to the character and subtlety of the exterior landscape; the shape of the individual mind is affected by the land as it is by genes.

There's so much to be afraid of.

Have we come all this way, I wondered, only to be dismantled by our own technologies, to be betrayed by political connivance or the impersonal avarice of a corporation?

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

For so many centuries, the exchange of gifts has held us together. It has made it possible to bridge the abyss where language struggles.

When I sit at that typewriter, I have to be frightened of what I'm trying to do. I'm frightened by my own belief that I can actually get a story down on paper.