“What will you do with your one precious, wild life?”

“Listen, whatever you see and love— that’s where you are.”

“Far off in the red mangroves an alligator has heaved himself onto a hummock of grass and lies there, studying his poems.”

“And I do not want anymore to be useful, to be docile, to lead / children out of the fields into the text / of civility, to teach them that they are (they are not) better than the grass.”

“May I be the tiniest nail in the house of the universe, tiny but useful.”

“Maybe the desire to make something beautiful is the piece of God that is inside each of us.”

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

“I would say that there exist a thousand unbreakable links between each of us and everything else, and that our dignity and our chances are one. The farthest star and the mud at our feet are a family; and there is no decency or sense in honoring one thing, or a few things, and then closing the list. The pine tree, the leopard, the Platte River, and ourselves - we are at risk together, or we are on our way to a sustainable world together. We are each other's destiny.”

“...whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh & exciting - over & over announcing your place in the family of things.”

“Today I'm flying low and I'm not saying a word. I'm letting all the voodoos of ambition sleep. The world goes on as it must, the bees in the garden rumbling a little, the fish leaping, the gnats getting eaten. And so forth. But I'm taking the day off. Quiet as a feather. I hardly move though really I'm traveling a terrific distance. Stillness. One of the doors into the temple.”

“Sometimes I really believe it, that I am going to save my life

“The face of the moose is as sad as the face of Jesus.”

“It is the nature of stone to be satisfied. It is the nature of water to want to be somewhere else.”

“When it's over, I want to say all my life I was a bride married to amazement.”

“You too can be carved anew by the details of your devotion.”

“The patterns of our lives reveal us. Our habits measure us.”

“Look, hasn't my body already felt like the body of a flower?”

“You’re like a little wild thing that was never sent to school.”

“Knowledge has entertained me and it has shaped me and it has failed me. Something in me still starves.”

“Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?”

“What would the world be like without music or rivers or the green and tender grass? Would would this would be like without dogs?”

“What does it mean, say the words, that the earth is so beautiful? And what shall I do about it? What is the gift that I should bring to the world? What is the life that I should live?”

“This is to say nothing against afternoons, evenings or even midnight. Each has its portion of the spectacular. But dawn — dawn is a gift. Much is revealed about a person about his or her passion, or indifference, to this opening of the door of day. No one who loves dawn, and is abroad to see it, could be a stranger to me.”

“No, I'd never been to this country before. No, I didn't know where the roads would lead me. No, I didn't intend to turn back.”

“Oh Lord of melons, of mercy, though I am not ready, nor worthy, I am climbing towards you.”

“You are young. So you know everything. You leap into the boat and begin rowing. But, listen to me. Without fanfare, without embarrassment, without doubt,I talk directly to your soul. Listen to me.”

“I could not be a poet without the natural world. Someone else could. But not me. For me the door to the woods is the door to the temple.”

“Sing, if you can sing, and if not still be musical inside yourself.”

“I had to go away for a few days so I called the kennel and made an appointment. I guess Bear overheard the conversation. “Love and company,” said Bear, “are the adornments that change everything. I know they’ll be nice to me, but I’ll be sad, sad, sad.” And pitifully he wrung his paws. I cancelled the trip.”

I have decided to find myself a home in the mountains, somewhere high up where one learns to live peacefully in the cold and the silence. It’s said that in such a place certain revelations may be discovered. That what the spirit reaches for may be eventually felt, if not exactly understood. Slowly, no doubt. I’m not talking about a vacation. Of course at the same time I mean to stay exactly where I am. Are you following me?”

“LONELINESS I too have known loneliness. I too have known what it is to feel misunderstood, rejected, and suddenly not at all beautiful. Oh, mother earth, your comfort is great, your arms never withhold. It has saved my life to know this. Your rivers flowing, your roses opening in the morning. Oh, motions of tenderness!”

“You must never stop being whimsical.”

“A dog comes to you and lives with you in your own house, but you do not therefore own her, as you do not own the rain, or the trees, or the laws which pertain to them.”

“The poem in which the reader does not feel himself or herself a participant is a lecture, listened to from an uncomfortable chair, in a stuffy room, inside a building.”

“Joy is not made to be a crumb. (Don't Hesitate)”

“My work is loving the world. Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird—equal seekers of sweetness.”

“How shall I touch you unless it is everywhere?”

“If you have ever gone to the woods with me, I must love you very much.”

“Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell others.”

would like people to remember of me, how inexhaustible was her mindfulness.”

When I have to die, I would like to die on a day of rain - long rain, slow rain, the kind you think will never end.”

“A dog can never tell you what she knows from the smells of the world, but you know, watching her, that you know almost nothing.”

“FIRST YOGA LESSON “Be a lotus in the pond,” she said, “opening slowly, no single energy tugging against another but peacefully, all together.” I couldn’t even touch my toes. “Feel your quadriceps stretching?” she asked. Well, something was certainly stretching. Standing impressively upright, she raised one leg and placed it against the other, then lifted her arms and shook her hands like leaves. “Be a tree,” she said. I lay on the floor, exhausted. But to be a lotus in the pond opening slowly, and very slowly rising— that I could do.”

“There is nothing more pathetic than caution when headlong might save a life, even, possibly, your own.”

“It is six A.M., and I am working. I am absentminded, reckless, heedless of social obligations, etc. It is as it must be. The tire goes flat, the tooth falls out, there will be a hundred meals without mustard. The poem gets written. I have wrestled with the angel and I am stained with light and I have no shame. Neither do I have guilt.”

“But mostly I just stand in the dark field, in the middle of the world, breathing”

“That’s the big question, the one the world throws at you every morning. “Here you are, alive. Would you like to make a comment?”

“I learned from Whitman that the poem is a temple--or a green field--a place to enter, and in which to feel.”

“I cherish two sentences and keep them close to my desk. The first is by Flaubert. I came upon it among Van Gough's letters. It says, simply, 'Talent is long patience, and originality an effort of will and of intense observation.”

“What I mean by spirituality is not theology, but attitude.”