We need beauty because it makes us ache to be worthy of it.

“I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.”

“It is better for the heart to break, than not to break.”

“it is a serious thing // just to be alive / on this fresh morning / in this broken world.”

“I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life. I wrote that way too.”

“I stood willingly and gladly in the characters of everything - other people, trees, clouds. And this is what I learned, that the world's otherness is antidote to confusion - that standing within this otherness - the beauty and the mystery of the world, out in the fields or deep inside books - can re-dignify the worst-stung heart.”

“When it's over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement.

“He is exactly the poem I wanted to write.”

“Said the river: imagine everything you can imagine, then keep on going.”

“And that is just the point... how the world, moist and beautiful, calls to each of us to make a new and serious response. That's the big question, the one the world throws at you every morning. "Here you are, alive. Would you like to make a comment?”

“I held my breath as we do sometimes to stop time when something wonderful has touched us...”

“Every day I see or hear something that more or less kills me with delight, that leaves me like a needle in the haystack of light.”

“But I also say this: that light is an invitation to happiness, and that happiness, when it's done right, is a kind of holiness, palpable and redemptive. ”

“I believe in kindness. Also in mischief.”

“Do you love this world? Do you cherish your humble and silky life? Do you adore the green grass, with its terror beneath?”

“I know many lives worth living.”

“What misery to be afraid of death. What wretchedness, to believe only in what can be proven.”

“Because of the dog's joyfulness, our own is increased. It is no small gift. It is not the least reason why we should honor as well as love the dog of our own life, and the dog down the street, and all the dogs not yet born. What would the world be like without music or rivers or the green and tender grass? What would this world be like without dogs?”

“And to tell the truth I don't want to let go of the wrists of idleness, I don't want to sell my life for money, I don't even want to come in out of the rain.”

“My work is the world. Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird - equal seekers of sweetness. Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums...”

“We need beauty because it makes us ache to be worthy of it.”

“It must be a great disappointment to God if we are not dazzled at least ten times a day.”

“The sea can do craziness, it can do smooth, it can lie down like silk breathing or toss havoc shoreward; it can give gifts or withhold all; it can rise, ebb, froth like an incoming frenzy of fountains, or it can sweet-talk entirely. As I can too, and so, no doubt, can you, and you.”

“When will you have a little pity for every soft thing that walks through the world, yourself included.”

“When will you have a little pity for every soft thing that walks through the world, yourself included.”

“There are a hundred paths through the world that are easier than loving. But, who wants easier?”

“After a cruel childhood, one must reinvent oneself. Then reimagine the world.”

“I know I can walk through the world, along the shore or under the trees, with my mind filled with things of little importance, in full self-attendance. A condition I can't really call being alive.”

“Things! Burn them, burn them! Make a beautiful fire! More room in your heart for love, for the trees! For the birds who own nothing—the reason they can fly.”

“There are moments that cry out to be fulfilled. Like, telling someone you love them. Or giving your money away, all of it. Your heart is beating, isn’t it? You’re not in chains, are you? There is nothing more pathetic than caution when headlong might save a life, even, possibly, your own.”

“When it’s over, I want to say: All my life I was a bride married to amazement.

“What will you do with your one precious, wild life?”

“Listen, whatever you see and love— that’s where you are.”

“Far off in the red mangroves an alligator has heaved himself onto a hummock of grass and lies there, studying his poems.”

“And I do not want anymore to be useful, to be docile, to lead / children out of the fields into the text / of civility, to teach them that they are (they are not) better than the grass.”

“May I be the tiniest nail in the house of the universe, tiny but useful.”

“Maybe the desire to make something beautiful is the piece of God that is inside each of us.”

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

“I would say that there exist a thousand unbreakable links between each of us and everything else, and that our dignity and our chances are one. The farthest star and the mud at our feet are a family; and there is no decency or sense in honoring one thing, or a few things, and then closing the list. The pine tree, the leopard, the Platte River, and ourselves - we are at risk together, or we are on our way to a sustainable world together. We are each other's destiny.”

“...whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh & exciting - over & over announcing your place in the family of things.”

“Today I'm flying low and I'm not saying a word. I'm letting all the voodoos of ambition sleep. The world goes on as it must, the bees in the garden rumbling a little, the fish leaping, the gnats getting eaten. And so forth. But I'm taking the day off. Quiet as a feather. I hardly move though really I'm traveling a terrific distance. Stillness. One of the doors into the temple.”

“Sometimes I really believe it, that I am going to save my life

“The face of the moose is as sad as the face of Jesus.”

“It is the nature of stone to be satisfied. It is the nature of water to want to be somewhere else.”

“When it's over, I want to say all my life I was a bride married to amazement.”

“You too can be carved anew by the details of your devotion.”

“The patterns of our lives reveal us. Our habits measure us.”

“Look, hasn't my body already felt like the body of a flower?”

“You’re like a little wild thing that was never sent to school.”

“Knowledge has entertained me and it has shaped me and it has failed me. Something in me still starves.”