Men come and go, cities rise and fall, whole civilizations appear and disappear-the earth remains, slightly modified. The earth remains, and the heartbreaking beauty where there are no hearts to break....I sometimes choose to think, no doubt perversely, that man is a dream, thought an illusion, and only rock is real. Rock and sun.

In marriage, the occasional catastrophic crisis is easier to manage than the daily routine.

Paradise is the here and now, the actual, tangible, dogmatically real Earth on which we stand. Yes, God bless America, the Earth upon which we stand.

The New Age orgy: The flesh was willing but the spirit's weak.

We can have wilderness without freedom; we can have wilderness without human life at all, but we cannot have freedom without wilderness, we cannot have freedom without leagues of open space beyond the cities, where boys and girls, men and women, can live at least part of their lives under no control but their own desires and abilities, free from any and all direct administration by their fellow men.

A cowboy is a hired hand on the middle of a horse contemplating the hind end of a cow.

Hierarchical institutions are like giant bulldozers -- obedient to the whim of any fool who takes the controls.