To allow mystery, which is to say to yourself, 'There could be more...things we don't understand,' is not to damn knowledge....It is to permit yourself an extraordinary, freedom: someone else does not have to be wrong in order that you might be right...This tolerance for mystery invigorates the imagination; and it is the imagination that gives shape to the universe.

Everything is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion.

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

It does not demean men to want to be what they imagine the wolf to be, but it does demean them to kill the animal for 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.

When we enter the landscape to learn something, we are obligated, I think, to pay attention rather than constantly to pose questions. To approach the land as we would a person, by opening an intelligent conversation. And to stay in one place, to make of that one, long observation a fully dilated experience. We will always be rewarded if we give the land credit for more than we imagine, and if we imagine it as being more complex even than language. In these ways we begin, I think, to find a home, to sense how to fit a place.

The most intelligent thing we can do is love, not reason.