We are the only species which, when it chooses to do so, will go to great effort to save what it might destroy.

Any life will provide the material for writing, if it is attended to.

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.

Do we respond only to people who seem to find us interesting?

We do not write what we know; we write what we want to find out.

One cannot be pessimistic about the West. This is the native home of hope. When it fully learns that cooperation, not rugged individualism, is the quality that most characterizes and preserves it, then it will have achieved itself and outlived its origins. Then it has a chance to create a society to match its scenery.

We write to make sense of it all.