All the green in the planted world consists of these whole, rounded chloroplasts wending their ways in water. If you analyze a molecule of chlorophyl….

Peeping through my keyhold I see within the range of only about 30 percent of the light that comes from the sun; the rest is infrared and some little….

The gaps are the thing. The gaps are the spirit's one home, the altitudes and latitudes so dazzlingly spare and clean that the spirit can discover i….

I alternate between thinking of the planet as home - dear and familiar stone hearth and garden - and as a hard land of exile in which we are all sojo….

It would seem that emotions are the curse, not death-emotions that appear to have developed upon a few freaks as a special curse from Malevolence. Al….

The Pulitzer is more useful than meaningful..

One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems go….

When I teach, I preach. I thump the Bible. I exhort my students morally. I talk to them about the dedicated life..

Does anything eat flowers. I couldn't recall having seen anything eat a flower - are they nature's privileged pets?.

Caring passionately about something isn't against nature, and it isn't against human nature. It's what we're here to do..

It makes more sense to write one big book - a novel or nonfiction narrative - than to write many stories or essays. Into a long, ambitious project yo….

Are you living just a little and calling that life?.

As a life's work, I would remember everything - everything, against loss. I would go through life like a plankton net..

You are wrong if you think that you can in any way take the vision and tame it... The vision is not so much destroyed, exactly, as it is, by the time….

why did I have to keep learning this same thing over and over?.

When I was six or seven years old, growing up in Pittsburgh, I used to take a precious penny of my own and hide it for someone else to find. I was gr….

We live half our waking lives and all of our sleeping lives in some private, useless, and insensible waters we never mention or recall..

When you write, you lay out a line of words. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory..

The point of going somewhere like the Napo River in Ecuador is not to see the most spectacular anything. It is simply to see what is there..

What do I make of all this texture? What does it mean about the kind of world in which I have been set down? The texture of the world, its filigree a….

If we were to judge nature by common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe the world existed..