Quotes from Peter Matthiessen

Nothing exists but atoms and the void"—so wrote Democritus. And it is "void" that underlies the Eastern teachings—not emptiness or absence, but the Uncreated that preceded all creation, the beginningless potential of all things.

Finding themselves denied access to their own building by the well-armed marshalls with their sandbag fortifications and machine guns, they realized that the feds intended to support Dick Wilson no matter what offenses he had committed, so long as he waged war on AIM; clearly, this Wilson was no different from other petty dictators around the world, propped up by weapons sent from the U.S. under the panoply of anti-Communism so long as they protected corporate interests.

supposed to be the shrine of democracy [Mount Rushmore] but really is the shrine of deceit . . . a desecration of a sacred spot, stolen from us in violation of the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868.

Watson told her that the sorry help at Chatham Bend these days couldn't pour piss out of a boot that had the instructions written on the heel.

I do, I really do." Lucius's heart cheered the man's mischievous ironies and buoyant spirit, the poignance and dogged love of life that was so moving in people who owned nothing, and also that in-the-bone endurance that in its way was a shaming of the whites and a profound rebuke.

Man is modifying the world so fast and so drastically that most animals cannot adapt to the new conditions. In the Himalaya as elsewhere there is a great dying, one infinitely sadder than the Pleistocene extinctions, for man now has the knowledge and the need to save these remnants of his past."1

Butter tea and wind pictures, the Crystal Mountain, and blue sheep dancing on the snow - it's quite enough! Have you seen the snow leopard? No! Isn't that wonderful?" ? Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard

Of course I enjoy this life! It's wonderful! Especially when I have no choice!

free life" as described by a mountaineer: "The mountains had been a natural field of activity where, playing on the frontiers of life and death, we had found the freedom for which we were blindly groping and which was as necessary to us as breath.

The Zen expression "Kill the Buddha!" means to kill any concept of the Buddha as something apart from oneself. To kill the Buddha is to be the Buddha.

That American [Philip Kapleau] was asking us whether it is possible for him to attain enlightenment in one week of sesshin. Tell him this for me: don't say days, weeks, years, or even lifetimes. Tell him to vow to attain enlightenment though it take the infinite, the boundless, the incalculable future.4

All worldly pursuits have but the one unavoidable and inevitable end, which is sorrow: acquisitions end in dispersion; buildings, in destruction; meetings, in separation; births, in death. Knowing this, one should from the very first renounce acquisition and heaping-up, and building and meeting, and . . . set about realizing the Truth. . . . Life is short, and the time of death is uncertain; so apply yourselves to meditation. . . .3 Meditation

despite a huge idle standing army—sponsored, of course, by military-industrial interests in the United States—that could just as well be out in the weary countryside planting new trees.

All other creatures look down toward the earth, but man was given a face so that he might turn his eyes toward the stars and his gaze upon the sky.

Kind of late to help him now. I missed my chance. Sins of omission, they will call it where I'm headed for.

He was a real scientist, born curious, but I seen his crippled hand twitch while he spoke: this man would rob them graves himself, being some way starved by life, bone greedy.

I think what we are feeling in this place is much too large for one simple soul to understand, too powerful.

only to be wholly present in this moment, moment after moment

then lung-gom may be simplistically regarded as a manifestation of mind over matter, of matter returning to energy

The only whole heart is the broken heart. But it must be wholly broken

in the wild joy of bursting forth, the rushing to welcome every moment of his life...

The point of life is to help others through it

In worrying about the future, I despoil the present; in my escape, I leave a true freedom behind

The mountain withdraws into its stillness, my body dissolves into the sunlight, tears fall that have nothing to do with i. What it is that brings them on, I do not know