Quotes About Reflection

We used to think the world was so big. So indestructible. So fun. We still can't completely believe that it is as small and serious, as threatened and vulnerable, as we have made it.

Marc Reisner's Cadillac Desert, Rick Bass's The Watch, Terry Tempest Williams's Refuge, Charles Bowden's Red Line, Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony, Doug Peacock's Grizzly Years, and Pam Houston's Cowboys Are My Weakness.

Terry Tempest Williams's koan came to me in an e-mail, which reads: "I loved both these men. I still feel their hands on my shoulder, wondering what they would be saying, writing, now. In so many ways, Ed was the conservative, Wally, forever the radical.

we might be able to intellectually understand that the West has lost 18% of its trees over the last 20 years, and at the same time be overcome by the quaking of a single Aspen leaf.

What I want to preserve are not just beautiful places but the possibility that an individual can, in this overheated, overcrowded world, find a place to be quiet and alone. To have their own freedom. Is this really too much to ask? Shouldn't there be a few places left to get away from motors? From the incessant roar of machines?

One thing I know is that the inward way is not the way," he said. "That's a trap. Anything that gets you outside of yourself is good. Don't look inside for salvation. Go spend a little time alone in the wilderness.

If I wanted to be famous, I could have been famous before.

Because I would give it all back to have my health.

the second time you see something is really the first time. You need to know how it ends before you can appreciate how beautifully it's put together from the beginning.

It's about the quality of the worry," I said. "I have happier worries now than I used to.

I had a girlfriend once. All we ever talked about was our relationship. That's what we did instead of having one.

Real readers poison themselves with words. They close each book as though climbing, reborn, from a tomb.

Poetry is anything you read out loud alone.

When I read, the words on the page replace the voice in my head and I cease, for a little while, to be me, or at least to be so painfully aware of being me.

Once, on a sleepless night, I elaborated a whole theory of art predicated on simply reminding the ever-forgetful mind of the most basic truths: We float in water and revolve around the sun. We are born out of a woman's body and are made of meat and bone. One day, pretty soon, we will die.

If something did go terribly wrong in human history – and given the current state of the world, it's hard to deny something did – then perhaps it began to go wrong precisely when people started losing that freedom to imagine and enact other forms of social existence, to such a degree that some now feel this particular type of freedom hardly even existed, or was barely exercised, for the greater part of human history.

As Orwell noted, a population busy working, even at completely useless occupations, doesn't have time to do much else.

Could there be anything more demoralizing than having to wake up in the morning five out of seven days of one's adult life to perform a task that one secretly believed did not need to be performed

Horror stories, whether about vampires, ghouls, or flesh-eating zombies, always seem to reflect some aspect of the tellers' own social lives, some terrifying potential, in the way they are accustomed to interact with each other, that they do not wish to acknowledge or confront, but also cannot help but talk about.

The result has been strangely paradoxical: anthropological reflections on their own culpability has mainly had the effect of providing non-anthropologists who do not want to be bothered having to learn about 90% of human experience with a handy two or three sentence dismissal (you know: all about projecting one's sense of Otherness into the colonized) by which they can feel morally superior to those who do.

The fact that we find it hard to imagine how such an alternative life could be endlessly engaging and interesting is perhaps more a reflection on the limits of our imaginations than on the life itself.

In short, [Native Americans] say, the name of savages, which we bestow upon them, would fit ourselves better, since there is nothing in our actions that bears an appearance of wisdom.

One of the few positive side effects of a prison system is that, simply by providing us information of what happens, and how humans behave under extreme situations of deprivation, we can learn basic truths about what it means to be human.

war, greed, exploitation, systematic indifference to others' suffering. Were we always like that, or did something, at some point, go terribly wrong?