I am impressed by how much of my grandparent's life depended on continuities, contacts, connections, friendships, and blood relationships.

Every book that anyone sets out on is a voyage of discovery that may discover nothing. Any voyager may be lost at sea, like John Cabot. Nobody can teach the geography of the undiscovered. All he can do is encourge the will to explore, plus impress upon the inexperienced a few of the dos and don'ts of voyaging.

A political animal can be defined as a body that will go on circulating a petition even with its heart cut out.

Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed ... so that never again can we have the chance to see ourselves single, separate, vertical and individual in the world, part of the environment of trees and rocks and soil, part of the natural world and competent to belong in it.

I consider the integrity of the material to be of greater value than any message I might want to get across.

Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.

Largeness is a lifelong matter - sometimes a conscious goal, sometimes not. You enlarge yourself because that is the kind of individual you are. You grow because you are not content not to.