We live in stories. What we are is stories. We do things because of what is called character, and our character is formed by the stories we learn to live in.

In learning to pay respectful attention to one another and plants and animals, we relearn the acts of empathy, and thus humility and compassion - ways of proceeding that grow more and more necessary as the world crowds in.

One of finest evocations of life in Western America in recent memory... Powerful and profoundly moving.

It is a skill we learn early, the art of inventing stories to explain away the fearful scared strangeness of the world. Storytelling and make-believe, like war and agriculture, are among the arts of self-defense, and all of them are ways of enclosing otherness and claiming ownership.

It is our duty to preserve huge tracts of land in something resembling its native condition. The biological interactions necessary to insure the continuities of life are astonishingly complex, and cannot take place in islands of semiwilderness like the national parks.

Writing is a funny business. You sit in your room and listen to voices and write everything down. What kind of a profession is that?

They knew bullshit, and they knew about the ruling class; dying for a ruling class cause was almost always bullshit.