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

Conversations are efforts toward good relations. They are an elementary form of reciprocity. They are the exercise of our love for each other. They are the enemies of our loneliness, our doubt, our anxiety, our tendencies to abdicate. To continue to be in good conversation over our enormous and terrifying problems is to be calling out to each other in the night. If we attend with imagination and devotion to our conversations, we will find what we need; and someone among us will act—it does not matter whom—and we will survive.

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

We simply do not understand our place in the universe and have not the courage to admit it.

In behaving respectfully toward all that the land contains, it is possible to imagine a stifling ignorance falling away from us.

real beauty is so deep you have to move into darkness to understand it.

The wolf exerts a powerful influence on the human imagination. It takes your stare and turns it back on you