It's perfectly possible to spend forty hours a week on a job that's meaningless, as long as you know what your real vocation is and find some way to express it. Then you won't confuse your job with the meaning of your life.

What shapes our lives are the questions we ask, refuse to ask, or never think to ask.

There has always been a part of me that saw wilderness and risk-taking as the path to freedom.

The telling of your stories is a revolutionary act.

The lover heals the world not by a vague and abstract love for everybody and everything, but by becoming passionate and vowing fidelity to concrete relationships, persons, institutions, and places.

Every time I come across a rattlesnake on my farm I initially react in fear and am tempted to kill it. Then I realize I wouldn't want to live in a world where all wild things - without and within - are domesticated.

I fall into all kinds of inauthenticity when I conspire to forget my mortality.