122 Quotes by Peter Matthiessen

The sun, coming hard around the world: the island rises from the sea, sinks, rises, holds.

In sexual abandon as in danger we are impelled, however briefly, into that vital present in which we do not stand apart from life, we ARE life, our being fills us, in ecstasy with another being, loneliness falls away into eternity. But in other days, such union was attainable through simple awe.

The slow stone metamorphoses filled him with longing – longing for what? Simplicity? Was simplicity the true nature of homegoing? The simple harmonies, earth order and abundance. In this churchyard in a woodland meadow at the end of a white road, he missed what he had never known, the peace of living one day then another in communion with others of one’s blood and at the end, at the close of one’s works and days, to draw that last breath and come to rest in earth where one’s bones belonged.

Course truth don’t count for much after all these years cause folks hangs on to what it suits ’em to believe and won’t let go of it.

Huntin too hard for the truth ain’t a good idea, y’know,” he added. “By the time you stumble over it, it ain’t the truth no more. Unless there’s death in it. I reckon death is about as close to truth as a man can come.

This stone on which the lizard lies was under the sea when lizards first came into being, and now the flood is wearing it away, to return it once again into the oceans.

To glimpse one’s own true nature is a kind of homegoing, to a place East of the Sun, West of the Moon – the homegoing that needs no home, like that waterfall on the upper Suli Gad that turns to mist before touching the earth and rises once again into the sky.

I nod to Death in passing, aware of the sound of my own feet upon my path. The.

Just goes to show how life leaks away when you ain’t paying attention. One day you look up, look around, and the world is empty. Not empty exactly but something is wrong, there ain’t no color left to life.” outraged, he glared at Lucius. “Watsons long gone and Coxes moved away, Burdetts and Betheas, too. Ain’t none of them good old families left. Died out or gone off to the cities, gone away like they was never here at all.