Everything drops away, comes to be unimportant in the dark. It's like sleep almost. A freedom from self, from ugliness.

You can't be a little bit saintly any more than you can be a little bit pregnant.

Teach the legal rights of trees, the nobility of hills; respect the beauty of singularity, the value of solitude.

We are dying of preconceptions, outworn rules, decaying flags, venomous religions, and sentimentalities. We need a new world. We've wrenched up all the old roots. The old men have no roots. They don't know it. They just go on talking and flailing away and falling down on the young with their tons of dead weight and their power. For the power is still there, in their life-in-death. But the roots are dead, and the land is poisoned for miles around them.

The earth was overwhelmed with beauty and indifferent to it, and I went with a heart ready to crack for its unbearable loveliness.

Old people who live too long come to resemble turtles. As though time turned in a curve, and down they go to the reptiles again. Not the little wet naked frog they were born. But the tortoise. Cold eyes, sagging circles of skin, the nose becomes beak. The shell of sleep.

What is sanity, after all, except the control of madness?