Great Throughts Treasury

"There is nothing very 'normal' about nature."

"This is the most enormous extension of vision of which life is capable: the projection of itself into other lives. This is the lonely, magnificent power of humanity. It is . . . the supreme epitome of the reaching out."

"This is the way wild things die, without question, without knowledge of mercy in the universe, knowing only themselves and their own pathway to the end. I wonder, walking further up the beach, if the man who shot the bird will die as well."

"Though men in the mass forget the origins of their need, they still bring wolfhounds into city apartments, where dog and man both sit brooding in wistful discomfort. The magic that gleams an instant between Argos and Odysseus is both the recognition of diversity and the need for affection across the illusions of form. It is nature's cry to homeless, far-wandering, insatiable man: Do not forget your brethren, nor the green wood from which you sprang. To do so is to invite disaster."

"Throughout the summer I had watched it grow but never troubled it. Now it lingered and bowed a trifle toward me as the winds began to touch it. A light not quite the sunlight of this earth was touching the flower, or perhaps it was the watering of my aging eye ? who knows? The plant would not long survive its journey but the flower seeds were autumn-brown. At every jolt for miles they would drop along the embankment. They were travelers ? travelers like Ishmael and myself, outlasting all fierce pursuits and destined to reemerge into future autumns. Like Ishmael, I thought, they will speak with the voice of the one true agent: 'I only am escaped to tell thee'."

"To have dragons one must have change; that is the first principle of dragon lore."

"To tell the story of a life one is bound to linger above gravestones where memory blurs and doors can be pushed ajar, but never opened. Listen, or do not listen, it is all the same."

"To the day of our deaths we exist in an inner solitude that is linked to the nature of life itself. Even as we project an affection upon others we endure a loneliness which is the price of all individual consciousness -- the price of living."

"Tomorrow lurks in us, the latency to be all that was not achieved before."

"We (humans) see ourselves as the culmination and the end, and if we do indeed consider our passing, we think that sunlight will go with us and the Earth will be dark. We think we are the end. For us, continents rose and fell, for us the waters and air were mastered, for us the great living web has pulsated and grown more intricate."

"We are one of many appearances of the thing called Life; we are not its perfect image, for it has no perfect image except Life, and life is multitudinous and emergent in the stream of time."

"We are rag dolls made out of many ages and skins, changelings who have slept in wood nests, and hissed in the uncouth guise of waddling amphibians. We have played such roles for infinitely longer ages than we have been human. Our identity is a dream. We are process, not reality."

"We do not like mists in this era, and the word imagination is less and less used."

"We have joined the caravan, you might say, at a certain point; we will travel as far as we can, but we cannot in a lifetime see all that we would like to see or learn all that we hunger to know."

"We think we learn from teachers, and we sometimes do. But the teachers are not always to be found in school or in great laboratories. Sometimes what we learn depends upon our own powers of insight."

"What if I am, in some way, only a sophisticated fire that has acquired an ability to regulate its rate of combustion and to hoard its fuel in order to see and walk?"

"What persists in my mind is an utter distrust of the longevity of civilization."

"When man becomes greater than nature, nature, which gave us birth, will respond."

"While I was sitting one night with a poet friend watching a great opera performed in a tent under arc lights, the poet took my arm and pointed silently. Far up, blundering out of the night, a huge Cecropia moth swept past from light to light over the posturings of the actors. ?He doesn?t know,? my friend whispered excitedly. ?He?s passing through an alien universe brightly lit but invisible to him. He?s in another play; he doesn?t see us. He doesn?t know. Maybe it?s happening right now to us."

"While wandering a deserted beach at dawn, stagnant in my work, I saw a man in the distance bending and throwing as he walked the endless stretch toward me. As he came near, I could see that he was throwing starfish, abandoned on the sand by the tide, back into the sea. When he was close enough I asked him why he was working so hard at this strange task. He said that the sun would dry the starfish and they would die. I said to him that I thought he was foolish. there were thousands of starfish on miles and miles of beach. One man alone could never make a difference. He smiled as he picked up the next starfish. Hurling it far into the sea he said, It makes a difference for this one. I abandoned my writing and spent the morning throwing starfish."

"Without the gift of flowers and the infinite diversity of their fruits, man and bird, if they had continued to exist at all, would be today unrecognizable."

"Without the past the pursued future has no meaning."

"Written deep in the human subconscious is a simple terror of what has come with us from the forest and sometimes haunts our dreams."

"You think that way as you begin to get grayer and you see pretty plainly that the game is not going to end as you planned."

"You think you've lost your fur and your tail for a purpose spelled with a capital P and sold to you in some book that explains how everything was just a prelude until you came. If you do, you're happy I take it, and you'd be better off not to be following me or this crab or lifting up stones and looking under them."