15 Quotes by Verlyn Klinkenborg

Flow is something the reader experiences, not the writer.

There's always an assumption of selflessness in planting a tree. You're supposed to think, while digging the hole, how far into the future the tree will grow and what shallow, unconvincing weeds we humans are in comparison. Standing by the young sprout, you're supposed to wonder who will see this tree when it's full-grown, and you're bound in duty to consider the serenity of your own grave.

Research, in nature’s laboratory, never stops. It explores every possibility. It never lacks funding. It is never demoralized by failed experiments. It cannot be lobbied.

Solve global warming, eliminate the nuclear threat, and we will still have to confront the vastness of our species and the way it diminishes, without thinking, all the other species around it.

Writing isn’t a conveyer belt bearing the reader to “the point” at the end of the piece, where the meaning will be revealed. Good writing is significant everywhere, Delightful everywhere.

When I say the grace of wildness, what I mean is its autonomy, its self-possession, the fact that it has nothing to do with us. The grace is in the separation, the distance, the sense of a self-sustaining way of life.

In school you learned to write as if the reader Were in constant danger of getting lost, A problem you were taught to solve not by writing clearly But by shackling your sentences and paragraphs together. Think about transitions. Remember how it goes? Late in the paragraph you prepare for the transition to the next paragraph – The great leap over the void, across that yawning indentation. You were taught the art of the flying trapeze, But not how to write.

With luck, you were read aloud to as a child.

Other seasons come abruptly but ask so little when they do. Winter is the only one that has to be relearned.