Every green natural place we save saves a fragment of our sanity and gives us a little more hope that we have a future.

We made plenty of mistakes, but we never tripped anybody to gain an advantage, or took illegal shortcuts when no judge was around. We have all jogged and panted it out the whole way.

I gave my heart to the mountains the minute I stood beside this river with its spray in my face and watched it thunder into foam, smooth to green glass over sunken rocks, shatter to foam again. I was fascinated by how it sped by and yet was always there; its roar shook both the earth and me.

We write to make sense of it all.

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.

Salt is added to dried rose petals with the perfume and spices, when we store them away in covered jars, the summers of our past.

A writer is an organism that will go on writing even after its heart has been cut out.