American individualism, much celebrated and cherished, has developed without its essential corrective, which is belonging.

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.

We simply need that wild country available to us... For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.

Faith can reclaim deserts as well as move mountains.

You can plan all you want to. You can lie in your morning bed and fill whole notebooks with schemes and intentions. But within a single afternoon, within hours or minutes, everything you plan and everything you have fought to make yourself can be undone as a slug is undone when salt is poured on him. And right up to the moment when you find yourself dissolving into foam you can still believe you are doing fine.

Human lives seldom conform to the conventions of fiction. Chekhov says that it is in the beginnings and endings of stories that we are most tempted to lie. I know what he means, and I agree.

American individualism, much celebrated and cherished, has developed without its essential corrective, which is belonging.