You get lost out of a desire to be lost. But in the place called lost strange things are found..

Getting lost was not a matter of geography so much as identity, a passionate desire, even an urgent need, to become no one and anyone, to shake off t….

It had come to me not in a sudden epiphany but with a gradual sureness, a sense of meaning like a sense of place. When you give yourself to places, t….

A place is a story, and stories are geography, and empathy is first of all an act of imagination, a storyteller's art, and then a way of traveling fr….

For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far….

A lone peak of high point is a natural focal point in the landscape, something by which both travelers and local orient themselves. In the continuum ….

[In mountaineering, if] we look for private experience rather than public history, even getting to the top becomes an optional narrative rather than ….

The stars we are given. The constellations we make. That is to say, stars exist in the cosmos, but constellations are the imaginary lines we draw bet….

I feel like we're in a truly revolutionary period, not just in terms of practical activities to overthrow regimes in the Middle East or Occupy but al….

Everyday life is a disaster, and disaster can liberate us..

I sometimes wonder what those of us who are writers would become in a nonliterary culture - storytellers? Hermits?.

There's enough food in this world. There's enough housing in this world. There's enough shelter in this world. There's enough clothing in this world.….

There are fossils of seashells high in the Himalayas; what was and what is are different things..

A lone walker is both present and detached, more than an audience but less than a participant. Walking assuages or legitimizes this alienation..

Places matter. Their rules, their scale, their design include or exclude civil society, pedestrianism, equality, diversity (economic and otherwise), ….

How do you calculate upon the unforeseen? It seems to be an art of recognizing the role of the unforeseen, of keeping your balance amid surprises, of….

If gold has been prized because it is the most inert element, changeless and incorruptible, water is prized for the opposite reason -- its fluidity, ….

I've been gratified to see over the twenty or so years of my writing life the West become less of a colony of the East; maybe new technologies and to….

We have only the language for fun and miserable, and maybe we need language for deep and shallow, meaningful and meaningless..

The great majority of people are calm, resourceful, altruistic or even beyond altruistic, as they risk themselves for others. We improvise the condit….

To lose yourself: a voluptuous surrender, lost in your arms, lost to the world, utterly immersed in what is present so that its surroundings fade awa….