Quotes from Verlyn Klinkenborg

A reasonable agriculture would do its best to emulate nature. Rather than change the earth to suit a crop... it would diversify its crops to suit the earth

Research, in nature's laboratory, never stops. It explores every possibility. It never lacks funding. It is never demoralized by failed experiments. It cannot be lobbied.

(Home is) a place we carry inside ourselves, a place where we welcome the unfamiliar because we know that as time passes it will become the very bedrock of our being.

Flow is something the reader experiences, not the writer.

Home is) a place we carry inside ourselves, a place where we welcome the unfamiliar because we know that as time passes it will become the very bedrock of our being.

With luck, you were read aloud to as a child.

In school you learned to write as if the reader Were in constant danger of getting lost, A problem you were taught to solve not by writing clearly But by shackling your sentences and paragraphs together. Think about transitions. Remember how it goes? Late in the paragraph you prepare for the transition to the next paragraph— The great leap over the void, across that yawning indentation. You were taught the art of the flying trapeze, But not how to write.

Writing isn't a conveyer belt bearing the reader to "the point" at the end of the piece, where the meaning will be revealed. Good writing is significant everywhere, Delightful everywhere.

There's always an assumption of selflessness in planting a tree. You're supposed to think, while digging the hole, how far into the future the tree will grow and what shallow, unconvincing weeds we humans are in comparison. Standing by the young sprout, you're supposed to wonder who will see this tree when it's full-grown, and you're bound in duty to consider the serenity of your own grave.

Natural" is a word that invites suspicion. It should always present itself in quotation marks, A sign that its meaning is slippery. Humans can justify almost anything by calling it natural. Naturalness is the pervasive myth—the one to root out of your head.

But" is always preferable to "however," Except in the rare cases where "however" is preferable to "but," Which

We forget something fundamental as we read: Every sentence could have been otherwise but isn't. We can't see all the decisions that led to the final shape of the sentence. But we can see the residue of those decisions.

Without extraneous words or phrases or clauses, there will be room for implication.

But long sentences often tend to collapse or break down or become opaque or trip over their awkwardness.

People clamor to tell their stories in words. This doesn't make them writers, Nor does it make their stories matter.

Then I remember it's January, a month when only the potatoes are optimistic about warmer weather.

And beyond the literal landscape—the one that has been tilled and planted or logged or fenced or simply let alone—there is the ideal landscape that lives only in the mind. Every day you explore the difference between the two, knowing that you can see what no one else can.