There are endless ways to amuse oneself and be idle, and most of them lie outside the woods. I assume that when a man goes to the woods he goes because he needs to. I think he is drawn to the wilderness much as he is drawn to a woman: it is, in its way, his opposite. It is as far as possible unlike his home or his work or anything he will ever manufacture. For that reason he can take from it a solace-an understanding of himself, of what he needs and what he can do without-such as he can find nowhere else.

It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey.

Action can only be understood in relation to place; only by staying in place can the imagination conceive or understand action in terms of consequence, of cause and effect. The meaning of action in time is inseparable from its meaning in place.

We need better government, no doubt about it. But we also need better minds, better friendships, better marriages, better communities.

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

Analogies have tied things together for me, personally. The fundamental one for me is the analogy between your relationship to your spouse and your relationship to your place. Both need to be a settled commitment and both involve continuous learning and adjusting.

An agrarian mind begins with the love of fields and ramifies in good farming, good cooking & good eating