And only the enlightened can recall their former lives; for the rest of us, the memories of past existences are but glints of light, twinges of longing, passing shadows, disturbingly familiar, that are gone before they can be grasped, like the passage of that silver bird on Dhaulagiri.

There's an elegiac quality in watching [American wilderness] go, because it's our own myth, the American frontier, that's deteriorating before our eyes. I feel a deep sorrow that my kids will never get to see what I've seen, and their kids will see nothing; there's a deep sadness whenever I look at nature now.

Have you seen the snow leopard? No! Isn't that wonderful?

Simplicity is the whole secret of well-being.

The purpose of our life is to help others through it.

This world is painted on a wild dark metal

In nonfiction, you have that limitation, that constraint, of telling the truth.