I knew that on that island one was driven back into the past. There was so much space, so much silence, so few meetings that one too easily saw out of the present, and then the past seemed ten times closer than it was.

Death is not in the nature of things; it is the nature of things. But what dies is the form. The matter is immortal.

The moon hung over the planet Earth, a dead thing over a dying thing.

The evolution of human mentality has put us all in vitro now, behind the glass wall of our own ingenuity.

We shall never fully understand nature (or ourselves), and certainly never respect it, until we dissociate the wild from the notion of usability - however innocent and harmless the use. For it is the general uselessness of so much of nature that lies at the root of our ancient hostility and indifference to it.

Despite all the identifying, measuring, photographing, I had managed to set the experience in a kind of present past, a having looked, even as I was temporally and physically still looking...It is not necessarily too little knowledge that causes ignorance; possessing too much, or wanting to gain too much, can produce the same result.

In some mysterious way woods have never seemed to me to be static things. In physical terms, I move through them; yet in metaphysical ones, they seem to move through me.

Because a star explodes and a thousand worlds like ours die, we know this world is. That is the smile: that what might not be, is.