Honesty is stronger medicine than sympathy, which may console but often conceals.

The toughness I was learning was not a martyred doggedness, a dumb heroism, but the art of accommodation. I thought: to be tough is to be fragile; to be tender is to be truly fierce.

I thought: to be tough is to be fragile; to be tender is to be truly fierce.

Finally, the lessons of impermanence taught me this: loss constitutes an odd kind of fullness; despair empties out into an unquenchable appetite for life.

Animals give us their constant, unjaded faces, and we burden them with our bodies and civilized ordeals.

Islands are reminders of arrivals and departures.

I like to think of the landscape not as a fixed place but as a path that is unwinding before my eyes, under my feet. To see and know a place is a contemplative act. It means emptying our minds and letting what is there, in all its mulitplicity and endless variety, come in.