The world, which God looked at and found entirely good, we find none too good to pollute entirely and destroy piecemeal.

A person who undertakes to grow a garden at home, by practices that will preserve rather than exploit the economy of the soil, has his mind precisely against what is wrong with us.

Nature is always trying to tell us that we are not so superior or independent or alone or autonomous as we may think.

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.

The form of a poem is invisible. A poem is not an "object." This is hard to accept in a mechanical age.

The living can't quit living because the world has turned terrible and people they love and need are killed. They can't because they don't. The light that shines into darkness and never goes out calls them on into life. It calls them back again into the great room. It calls them into their bodies and into the world, into whatever the world will require. It calls them into work and pleasure, goodness and beauty, and the company of other loved ones.

It gets darker and darker and darker, and then Jesus is born.