There is a wolf in me... - I keep this wolf because the wilderness gave it to me and the wilderness will not let it go.

Arithmetic is numbers you squeeze from your head to your hand to your pencil to your paper till you get the answer.

I want to do the right thing, but often I don't know just what the right thing is. Every day I know I have come short of what I would like to have done. Yet as the years pass and I see the very world itself, with its oceans and mountains and plains, as something unfinished, a peculiar little satisfaction hunts out the corners of my heart. Sunsets and evening shadows find me regretful at task's undone, but sleep and the dawn and the air of the morning touch me with freshening hopes. Strange things blow in through my window on the wings of the night wind and I don't worry about my destiny.

Poetry is a plan for a slit in the face of a bronze fountain goat and the path of fresh drinking water.

And how should a beautiful, ignorant stream of water know it heads for an early release — out across the desert, running toward the Gulf, below sea level, to murmur its lullaby, and see the Imperial Valley rise out of burning sand with cotton blossoms, wheat, watermelons, roses, how should it know?

I cried over beautiful things, knowing no beautiful thing lasts.

The impact of television on our culture is just indescribable.