Annual plants are nature's emergency medical service, seeded in sounds and scars to hold the land until the perennial cover is re-established.

I lack the peace of simple things. I am never wholly in place. I find no peace or grace. We sell the world to buy fire, our way lighted by burning men.

Waking up from a dream of violence is much the same as waking up from a dream of love. You must go on living your life.

A change of heart or of values without a practice is only another pointless luxury of a passively consumptive way of life.

We know enough of our own history by now to be aware that people exploit what they have merely concluded to be of value, but they defend what they love. To defend what we love we need a particularizing language, for we love what we particularly know.

But our waste problem is not the fault only of producers. It is the fault of an economy that is wasteful from top to bottom-a symbiosis of an unlimited greed at the top and a lazy, passive, and self-indulgent consumptiveness at the bottom-and all of us are involved in it.

I could die in peace, I think, if the world was beautiful. To know it's being ruined is hard.