It's kind of alarming for me to realize that, when I'm writing stories about times I remember, it's already historical fiction.

Community, then, is an indispensable term in any discussion of the connection between people and land. A healthy community is a form that includes all the local things that are connected by the larger, ultimately mysterious form of the Creation. In speaking of community, then, we are speaking of a complex connection not only among human beings or between humans and their homeland but also between human economy and nature, between forest or prairie and field or orchard, and between troublesome creatures and pleasant ones. All neighbors are included.

There comes . . . a longing never to travel again except on foot.

The only time I've been arrested was in opposing the Marble Hill nuclear power plant in Indiana. That was in 1979.

Thinking is the most overrated human activity.

I have always loved a window, especially an open one.

The country where he lives is haunted by the ghost of an old forest. In the cleared fields where he gardens and pastures his horses it stood once, and will return. There will be a resurrection of the wild. Already it stands in wait at the pasture fences.