A viable neighborhood is a community: and a viable community is made up of neighbors who cherish and protect what they have in common.

When the self is ones exclusive subject and limit, reference and measure, one has no choice but to make a world of words.

If the crop of any one year was all, a man would have to cut his throat every time it hailed.

If one accepts the 24th and 104th Psalms as scriptural norms, then surface mining and other forms of earth destruction are perversions. If we take the Gospels seriously, how can we not see industrial warfare - with its inevitable massacre of innocents - as a most shocking perversion? By the standard of all scriptures, neglect of the poor, of widows and orphans, of the sick, the homeless, the insane, is an abominable perversion.

It is no more possible to live in the future than it is to live in the past. If life is not now, it is never.

Don't pray for the rain to stop; pray for good luck fishing when the river floods.

The question before me, now that I am old, is not how to be dead, which I know from enough practice, but how to be alive, as these worn hills still tell, and some paintings of Paul Cezanne, and this mere singing wren, who thinks he's alive forever, this instant, and may be.