Occupation: Novelist Birth: May 22, 1927 Death: April 5, 2014
The concept of conservation is a far truer sign of civilization than that spoilation of a continent which we once confused with progress..
Zen is really just a reminder to stay alive and to be awake. We tend to daydream all the time, speculating about the future and dwelling on the past.….
The great stillness in these landscapes that once made me restless seeps into me day by day, and with it the unreasonable feeling that I have found w….
The secret of the mountain is that the mountains simply exist, as I do myself: the mountains exist simply, which I do not. The mountains have no "mea….
Simultaneously I am myself, the child I was, the old man I will be..
The purpose of our life is to help others through it..
In this very breath that we take now lies the secret that all great teachers try to tell us..
If we were doomed to live forever, we would scarcely be aware of the beauty around us..
The purpose of meditation practice is not enlightenment; it is to pay attention even at extraordinary times, to be of the present, nothing-but-in-the….
Amazingly, we take for granted that instinct for survival, fear of death, must separate us from the happiness of pure and uninterpreted experience, i….
You see ... a man like me, a cautious man, has his life all figured out according to a pattern, and then the pattern flies apart. You run around for ….
How could I say that I wished to penetrate the secrets of the mountains in search of something still unknown that, like the yeti, might well be misse….
I think in any writing you're paying attention to detail..
I meditate for the last time on this mountain that is bare, though others all around are white with snow. Like the bare peak of the koan, this one i….
I used to distinguish between my fiction and nonfiction in terms of superiority or inferiority..
In fiction, you have a rough idea what's coming up next - sometimes you even make a little outline - but in fact you don't know. Each day is a whole ….
In the clearness of this Himalayan air, mountains draw near, and in such splendor, tears come quietly to my eyes and cool on my sunburned cheeks. th….
In zazen, one is one's present self, what one was, and what one will be, all at once..
The sun is roaring, it fills to bursting each crystal of snow. I flush with feeling, moved beyond my comprehension, and once again, the warm tears fr….
In nonfiction, you have that limitation, that constraint, of telling the truth..
Alec Wilkinson is a spare, clear, and lucid writer who works in stylistic simplicity with material that is not simple at all..