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

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

“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.”

“...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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

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

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

"My will and my desire were both revolved, as is a wheel in even motion driven, by Love, which moves the sun and other stars."

"If you follow your natural bent;you will definitely go to heaven"

"The poets leave hell and again behold the stars."