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

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

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.

The writer works on the inside and the critic works on the outside. I don't know what it looks like on the outside, sometimes. It's not that I'm not interested-it's not where I live. I live inside the story.

One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once, life would collapse. There are simply no definitive answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.

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

No culture has yet solved the dilemma each has faced with the growth of a conscious mind: how to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in all life, when one finds darkness not only in one’s own culture but within oneself.