Ecosystems are holy. The word "environmental" is a deadly compromise itself. It's a policy word that lives only in the head, and barely there.

The bad thing about falling into pieces is that it hurts. The good thing about it is that once you're lying there in shards you've got nothing left to protect, and so have no reason not to be honest

As a lifelong student of the world’s wisdom literature, it is my duty to inform students that “ridding the world of evil” is a goal very different from any recommended by Jesus, Buddha, or Muhammad, though not so different from some recommended by the Josephs Stalin and McCarthy and by Mao Tse Tung.

The environment, what surrounds you, is so alive and delightful and complex.

Ecosystems are holy. The word "environmental" is a deadly compromise itself. It's a policy word that lives only in the head, and barely there.

But I finally concluded that it is an inalienable right of lovers everywhere to become temporarily worthless to the world, it may even be their duty.

There are many things worth telling that are not quite narrative. And eternity itself possesses no beginning, middle or end. Fossils, arrowheads, castle ruins, empty crosses: from the Parthenon to the Bo Tree to a grown man's or woman's old stuffed bear, what moves us about many objects is not what remains but what has vanished. There comes a time, thanks to rivers, when a few beautiful old teeth are all that remain of the two-hundred-foot spires of life we call trees. There comes a river, whose current is time, that does a similar sculpting in the mind.