“Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?”

“What would the world be like without music or rivers or the green and tender grass? Would would this would be like without dogs?”

“What does it mean, say the words, that the earth is so beautiful? And what shall I do about it? What is the gift that I should bring to the world? What is the life that I should live?”

“This is to say nothing against afternoons, evenings or even midnight. Each has its portion of the spectacular. But dawn — dawn is a gift. Much is revealed about a person about his or her passion, or indifference, to this opening of the door of day. No one who loves dawn, and is abroad to see it, could be a stranger to me.”

“No, I'd never been to this country before. No, I didn't know where the roads would lead me. No, I didn't intend to turn back.”

“Oh Lord of melons, of mercy, though I am not ready, nor worthy, I am climbing towards you.”

“You are young. So you know everything. You leap into the boat and begin rowing. But, listen to me. Without fanfare, without embarrassment, without doubt,I talk directly to your soul. Listen to me.”

“I could not be a poet without the natural world. Someone else could. But not me. For me the door to the woods is the door to the temple.”

“Sing, if you can sing, and if not still be musical inside yourself.”

“I had to go away for a few days so I called the kennel and made an appointment. I guess Bear overheard the conversation. “Love and company,” said Bear, “are the adornments that change everything. I know they’ll be nice to me, but I’ll be sad, sad, sad.” And pitifully he wrung his paws. I cancelled the trip.”

I have decided to find myself a home in the mountains, somewhere high up where one learns to live peacefully in the cold and the silence. It’s said that in such a place certain revelations may be discovered. That what the spirit reaches for may be eventually felt, if not exactly understood. Slowly, no doubt. I’m not talking about a vacation. Of course at the same time I mean to stay exactly where I am. Are you following me?”

“LONELINESS I too have known loneliness. I too have known what it is to feel misunderstood, rejected, and suddenly not at all beautiful. Oh, mother earth, your comfort is great, your arms never withhold. It has saved my life to know this. Your rivers flowing, your roses opening in the morning. Oh, motions of tenderness!”

“You must never stop being whimsical.”

“A dog comes to you and lives with you in your own house, but you do not therefore own her, as you do not own the rain, or the trees, or the laws which pertain to them.”

“The poem in which the reader does not feel himself or herself a participant is a lecture, listened to from an uncomfortable chair, in a stuffy room, inside a building.”

“Joy is not made to be a crumb. (Don't Hesitate)”

“My work is loving the world. Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird—equal seekers of sweetness.”

“How shall I touch you unless it is everywhere?”

“If you have ever gone to the woods with me, I must love you very much.”

“Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell others.”

would like people to remember of me, how inexhaustible was her mindfulness.”

When I have to die, I would like to die on a day of rain - long rain, slow rain, the kind you think will never end.”

“A dog can never tell you what she knows from the smells of the world, but you know, watching her, that you know almost nothing.”

“FIRST YOGA LESSON “Be a lotus in the pond,” she said, “opening slowly, no single energy tugging against another but peacefully, all together.” I couldn’t even touch my toes. “Feel your quadriceps stretching?” she asked. Well, something was certainly stretching. Standing impressively upright, she raised one leg and placed it against the other, then lifted her arms and shook her hands like leaves. “Be a tree,” she said. I lay on the floor, exhausted. But to be a lotus in the pond opening slowly, and very slowly rising— that I could do.”

“There is nothing more pathetic than caution when headlong might save a life, even, possibly, your own.”

“It is six A.M., and I am working. I am absentminded, reckless, heedless of social obligations, etc. It is as it must be. The tire goes flat, the tooth falls out, there will be a hundred meals without mustard. The poem gets written. I have wrestled with the angel and I am stained with light and I have no shame. Neither do I have guilt.”

“But mostly I just stand in the dark field, in the middle of the world, breathing”

“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 learned from Whitman that the poem is a temple--or a green field--a place to enter, and in which to feel.”

“I cherish two sentences and keep them close to my desk. The first is by Flaubert. I came upon it among Van Gough's letters. It says, simply, 'Talent is long patience, and originality an effort of will and of intense observation.”

“What I mean by spirituality is not theology, but attitude.”

“Or maybe it’s about the wonderful things that may happen if you break the ropes that are holding you.”

“Let me keep my distance, always, from those who think they have the answers.”

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

“When loneliness comes stalking, go into the fields, consider the orderliness of the world.”

“Invention hovers always a little above the rules.”

“All eternity is in the moment.”

“When death comes…. I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering: what it’s going to be like, that cottage of darkness?”

“Do you think the wren ever dreams of a better house?”

“that your spirit grow in curiosity, that your life be richer than it is, that you bow to the earth as you feel how it actually is, that we—so clever, and ambitious, and selfish, and unrestrained— are only one design of the moving, the vivacious many.”

“that your spirit grow in curiosity, that your life be richer than it is, that you bow to the earth as you feel how it actually is, that we—so clever, and ambitious, and selfish, and unrestrained— are only one design of the moving, the vivacious many.”

Going to Walden is not so easy a thing As a green visit. It is the slow and difficult Trick of living, and finding it where you are.”

“to leap into it and hold on, connecting everything,”

“ANGELS You might see an angel anytime and anywhere. Of course you have to open your eyes to a kind of second level, but it’s not really hard. The whole business of what’s reality and what isn’t has never been solved and probably never will be. So I don’t care to be too definite about anything. I have a lot of edges called Perhaps and almost nothing you can call Certainty. For myself, but not for other people. That’s a place you just can’t get into, not entirely anyway, other people’s heads. I’ll just leave you with this. I don’t care how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. It’s enough to know that for some people they exist, and that they dance.”

“And did you feel it, in your heart, how it pertained to everything? And have you finally figured out what beauty is for?

“Certainly there is within each of us a self that is neither a child, nor a servant of the hours. It is a third self, occasional in some of us, tyrant in others. This self is out of love with the ordinary; it is out of love with time. It has a hunger for eternity. Intellectual”

“Language is, in other words, not necessary, but voluntary. If it were necessary, it would have stayed simple; it would not agitate our hearts with ever-present loveliness and ever-cresting ambiguity; it would not dream, on its long white bones, of turning into song.”

“But literature, the best of it, does not aim to be literature. It wants and strives, beyond that artifact part of itself, to be a true part of the composite human record—that is, not words but a reality.”

“Then I remember: death comes before the rolling away of the stone.”

“The multiplicity of forms! The hummingbird, the fox, the raven, the sparrow hawk, the otter, the dragonfly, the water lily! And on and on. It must be a great disappointment to God if we are not dazzled at least ten times a day.”