Quotes from Peter Matthiessen

To practice Zen means to realize one's existence in the beauty and clarity of this present moment, rather than letting life unravel in useless daydreaming of the past and future. To rest in the present is a state of magical simplicity.

It was a gringo; in the remote corners of the world the short-sleeved flowered tourist shirt, the steel-rimmed glasses, khaki pants and bulldog shoes had become the uniform of earnest American enterprise. Moon recognized the man as the new missionary. His head was cropped too close, so that his white skull gleamed, and the red skin of his neck and jaw was riddled with old acne; his face was bald with anxiety and tiresome small agonies.

His sunrise mood evaporated with the dew, giving way to restlessness, disquiet. All his life, Lucius's moods had been prey to shifts of light, and now a leaden melancholy dragged at his spirits.

I'm surprised you holy people talk to me," Wolfie said suddenly, "after what I done." He swayed there a moment, frowning. "As a Catholic priest, I must accept men's frailty. And as a European I am too old and tired to expend emotion upon matters I can do nothing about.

I was overtaken by a dread of utter solitude in the great turning world.

There is a difference between right and wrong, always was and always will be, but each man's wrong and each man's right are different.

Just goes to show how life leaks away when you ain't paying attention. One day you look up, look around, and the world is empty. Not empty exactly but something is wrong, there ain't no color left to life." outraged, he glared at Lucius. "Watsons long gone and Coxes moved away, Burdetts and Betheas, too. Ain't none of them good old families left. Died out or gone off to the cities, gone away like they was never here at all.

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 what I was searching for without ever having discovered what it was.

Well, he was scarcely a parfit gentil knight; as Wolfie said, he looked like some Hollywood Geronimo trying to kick a ninety-dollar habit.

The boy Weneluke wove hand patterns with a string, working skillfully into abstract designs on all eight fingers: one of these represented a man and woman facing each other, and, by manipulating each sex, he arrived at a nice parody of copulation.

As the hand held before the eye conceals the greatest mountain, so the little earthly life hides from the glance the enormous lights and mysteries of which the world is full, and he who can draw it away from before his eyes, as one draws away a hand, beholds the great shining of the inner worlds. RABBI NACHMANN OF BRATZLAV

You could of heard a spider sip a breath.

This stone on which the lizard lies was under the sea when lizards first came into being, and now the flood is wearing it away, to return it once again into the oceans.

I nod to Death in passing, aware of the sound of my own feet upon my path. The

You truly see by not trying to see.

In sexual abandon as in danger we are impelled, however briefly, into that vital present in which we do not stand apart from life, we ARE life, our being fills us, in ecstasy with another being, loneliness falls away into eternity. But in other days, such union was attainable through simple awe.

Small bits of life crawled and flew about the ward on ancient business.

Trouble was, they never let on to their sons how scared they was—so scared they forgot the color of a man because he could outshoot the man who scared 'em. And bein ashamed, they never talked about it or discussed it in the family.

Webster growled a Webster kind of prayer: "God Almighty, here is two more meek that has inherited Your earth." Webster spoke in his own peculiar way; we never did learn how to hear him.

It is difficult to adjust because I do not know who is adjusting; I am no longer that old person and not yet the new.

Home was that lone house on its great bend of Chatham River, no destination anymore but only the source of a vague sadness he thought of as "homegoing," a returning to the lost paradise of true belonging.

All animals and wayfarers are Tukten's friends, and listen to him carefully, yet he rarely speaks except when spoken to, and never seems to speak too much; without obtruding, he becomes the centre of each situation, so naturally does he belong where the moment finds him.

this man would rob them graves himself, being some way starved by life, bone greedy.

Watson loved them sour kind of jokes, which I enjoyed myself. I mean, ain't life some kind of a sour joke? Might's well laugh, that's the way him and me seen it, whether nice folks seen the joke or not. One time when Watson caught me grinning along with him, he give a wink and lifted up his hat.