It is sad that unless you are born a god, your life,from its very beginning, is a mystery to you.

It's too easy to say this or that is "race," and that has been a vehicle for an incredible amount of wrong in the world.

Gardening is really an extended form of reading, of history and philosophy. The garden itself has become like writing a book. I walk around and walk around. Apparently people often see me standing there and they wave to me and I don't see them because I am reading the landscape.

The truth we have to face about the world we live in is that it's driven by profit, and contradictions and doubts are not profitable. They yield wisdom, but wisdom is not profitable. I find pleasure in doubt, but let's face it, my pleasure is not very profitable. To me, the truth is that things mean many things at once, and all of them opposed to each other, and all of them true.

I know that the fantastic amount of profit that people want to make on anything is damaging. And that none of us seem able to resist it.

This naming of things is so crucial to possession - a spiritual padlock with the key thrown irretrievably away - that it is a murder, an erasing, and it is not surprising that when people have felt themselves prey to it (conquest), among their first acts of liberation is to change their names.

The inevitable is no less a shock just because it is inevitable.