Quotes from Peter Matthiessen

Religion is not to go to God by forsaking the world but to find Him in it.

Days and months are the travellers of eternity. So

Maybe you're just wandering around out here with your thumb up your ass, waiting for some answer that might let you off the hook.

the Land of Dolpo, all but unknown to Westerners even today, was said to be the last enclave of pure Tibetan culture left on earth, and Tibetan culture was the last citadel of "all that present-day humanity is longing for, either because it has been lost or

not yet been realized or because it is in danger of disappearing from human sight: the stability of a tradition, which has its roots not only in a historical or cultural past, but within the innermost being of man. . . ."2

One minute he was packing in grub like Judas Priest at the Last Supper and the next he was felled like a stockyard beef, that's how quick Death had him, his mouth oozing sweet potato like the hind end of a turkey packed with stuffing.

The energy or essence or breath of being that is called prana by Hindu yogins and chi by the Chinese is known as orenda to the Cree.20

In this toxic atmosphere, good intentions are eroding like the noses of stone gargoyles on cathedral peaks.

made all our hopes and struggles in this world simply ridiculous for the fundamental reason that our precious human life, for all its joys, was blood-soaked, cruel, and empty, with only sorrow, fear, disease at its dark end, fading to nothingness. Staring back at him, I thought, Was this a society of human beings or some purgatory where folks was condemned to live their lives with a laughing killer loose amongst them like a wolf?

The energy or essence or breath of being that is called prana by Hindu yogins and chi by the Chinese is known as orenda to the Cree.

Nen is mindfulness, attention to the present with a quality of vibrant awareness, as if this present moment were one's last.

Upon the path, in the glint of mica and odd shining stones, lies the yellow and gray-blue feather of an unknown bird. And there comes a piercing intuition, by no means understood, that in this feather on the silver path, this rhythm of wood and leather sounds, breath, sun and wind, and rush of river, in a landscape without past or future time—in this instant, in all instants, transience and eternity, death and life are one.

Since you claim him as a kinsman, Private Watson, you cannot have forgotten the immortal words of Jefferson of Virginia." Here he shouted, "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just!

Epwo m-baa pokin in-gitin'got (Everything has an end.)

That's the only way to do it—go.

The wants of the primitive are few, since he does not envy what he knows nothing of.

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

Separated from the herd, it gains identity.

Of course I am happy here! It's wonderful! Especially when I have no choice!

A true experience of prajna corresponds to "enlightenment" or liberation—not change, but transformation—a profound vision of his identity with universal life, past, present, and future, that keeps man from doing harm to others and sets him free from fear of birth-and-death. In

In the boulder at my back, there is a shudder, so slight that at another time it might have gone unnoticed. The tremor comes again; the earth is nudging me. And still I do not see.

The shadow of sharks is the shadow of death, and they call forth dim ultimate fears. Yet there is something holy in their silence.

The present book draws together in one work the themes that have absorbed me all my life—the pollution of land and air and water that is inevitable in the blind obliteration of the wilderness and its wild creatures and also the injustice to the poor of our own species, especially the indigenous peoples and the inheritors of slavery left behind by the cruel hypocrisy of what those in power represent as progress and democracy. E.