122 Quotes by Peter Matthiessen

I think I must be disappointed, having come so far, and yet I do not feel that way. I am disappointed, and also, I am not disappointed. That the snow leopard is, that it is here, that its frosty eyes watch us from the mountain – that is enough.

This is a fine chance to let go, to “win my life by losing it,” which means not recklessness but acceptance, not passivity but nonattachment.

His sunrise mood evaporated with the dew, giving way to restlessness, disquiet. All his life, Lucius’s moods had been prey to shifts of light, and now a leaden melancholy dragged at his spirits.

Webster growled a Webster kind of prayer: “God Almighty, here is two more meek that has inherited Your earth.” Webster spoke in his own peculiar way; we never did learn how to hear him.

I think in any writing you’re paying attention to detail.

It is difficult to adjust because I do not know who is adjusting; I am no longer that old person and not yet the new.

When we are mired in the relative world, never lifting our gaze to the mystery, our life is stunted, incomplete; we are filled with yearning for that paradise that is lost when, as young children, we replace it with words and ideas and abstractions – such as merit, such as past, present, and future – our direct, spontaneous experience of the thing itself, in the beauty and precision of this present moment.

You truly see by not trying to see.

For people who must live from day to day, past and future have small relevance, and their grasp of it is fleeting; they live in the moment, a very precious gift that we have lost.