It is the beginning of wisdom when you recognize that the best you can do is choose which rules you want to live by, and it's persistent and aggravated imbecility to pretend you can live without any.

Values, both those that we approve and those that we don't, have roots as deep as creosote rings, and live as long and grow as slowly

You have to get over the color green; you have to quit associating beauty with gardens and lawns; you have to get used to an inhuman scale; you have to understand geological time.

Fossil energy is the worst discovery man ever made, and his disruption of the carbon-oxygen cycle is the greatest of his triumphs over nature. Through thinner and thinner air we labor toward our last end, conquerors finally of even the earth chemistry that created us.

We are fossils in the making.

wherever you find the greatest good, you will find the greatest evil, because evil loves paradise as much as good.

[I]t is dangerous for a bride to be apologetic about her husband.