Quotes About Reflection

For the first time, she realizes that being alone is a contradiction in terms. Even in a body's most private moments, something else joins in.

He has always been alien to her, a man of procedures where there should be passions. Now she wonders if he might have died, once, too.

Who does the tree-hugger really hug, when he hugs a tree?

That's the trouble with people, their root problem. Life runs alongside them, unseen. Right here, right next.

She writes her favorite lines in the inside covers of her field notebooks and peeks at them when department politics and the cruelty of frightened humans get her down. The words withstand the full brutality of day. We all travel the Milky Way together, trees and men. . . . In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks. The clearest way into the universe is through a forest wilderness.

All the good things in her came into us. Now we keep her alive, with whatever we can remember

An old man, I want only peace. The things of this world mean nothing. I know no good way to live and I can't stop getting lost in my thoughts, my ancient forests. The wind that waves the pines loosens my belt. The mountain moon lights me as I play my lute. You ask: how does a man rise or fall in this life? The fisherman's song flows deep under the river.

The tree is saying things, in words before words. It says: Sun and water are questions endlessly worth answering. It says: A good answer must be reinvented many times, from scratch.

Sol 3, that little blue dot, had a lot going for it, when you could get away from the dominant species long enough to clear your head.

great truth comes over him: Trees fall with spectacular crashes. But planting is silent and growth is invisible.

chorus of living wood sings to the woman: If your mind were only a slightly greener thing, we'd drown you in meaning.

She feeds him and sets him up with the TV. The screen is news, travel, the company of others, a reminder of the luck he'd had all life long and failed to see.

Its effect is like that of a higher thought or a better emotion coming over me, when I deemed I was thinking justly or doing right.

The question stops the man, as simple ones sometimes do. He stands lost in the universe's weeds, hunched a little from the stronger gravity of the world he visits.

real joy consists of knowing that human wisdom counts less than the shimmer of beeches in a breeze. as certain as weather coming from the west, the things people know for sure will change. there is no knowing for a fact. the only dependable things are humility and looking.

real joy consists of knowing that human wisdom counts less than the shimmer of beeches in a breeze.

What we care for, we will grow to resemble. And what we resemble will hold us, when we are us no longer. . . .

But Now, that next best of times, is long, and rewrites everything.

What else is there to say to a bear? 'Apologize!' I tell him. People very stupid. They forget everything--where they come from, where they go. I say, 'Don't worry. People leaving this world very soon. Then the bear get top bunk to himself again.

Things with clean, concise, right answers are antidotes to human existence.

THREE-QUARTERS OF A CENTURY dances by in a five-second flip. Nicholas Hoel thumbs through the stack of a thousand photos, watching for those decades' secret meaning. At twenty-five, he's back for a moment on the farm where he has spent every Christmas of his life. He's lucky to be there, given the cancellations. Snowstorms sweep in from the west, grounding planes all over the country

For the first time, she realizes that being alone is a contradiction in terms.

legacy cognitive blindness will forever prevent people from acting in their own best interests.

If life demanded a slavish commitment to one pursuit, there were worse things to commit to than calculating the cash value of death.