Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed We need wilderness preserved — as much of it as is still left, and as many kinds — because it was the challenge against which our character as a people was formed We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.

Whatever landscape a child is exposed to early on, that will be the sort of gauze through which he or she will see all the world afterwards.

I balked at nothing, I was above nothing. Everything had something to teach me.

Home is a notion that only nations of the homeless fully appreciate and only the uprooted comprehend.

It is the abiding concern of thinking people to preserve what keeps men human-to save our contact with nature of which we are a part.

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

[Friendship] is a relationship that has no formal shape, there are no rules or obligations or bonds as in marriage or the family, it is held together by neither law nor property nor blood, there is no glue in it but mutual liking. It is therefore rare.