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.

If we represent knowledge as a tree, we know that things that are divided are yet connected. We know that to observe the divisions and ignore the connections is to destroy the tree.

Returning from the wilderness a man becomes a restorer of order, a preserver. He sees the truth, recognizes his true heir, honors his forbears and his heritage, and gives his blessing to his successors. He embodies the passing of human time, living and dying within the human limits of grief and joy.

Not just self-restraint, that old killjoy, but communal restraint.

It's impossible to contemplate the life of soil very long without seeing its analogy to the life of the spirit.

Beauty . . . cannot be interpreted. It is not an empirically verifiable fact; it is not a quantity.

Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias. Say that your main crop is the forest that you did not plant, that you will not live to harvest. Say that the leaves are harvested when they have rotted into the mold. Call that profit. Prophesy such returns. Put your faith in the two inches of humus that will build under the trees every thousand years.