Peter Matthiessen Quotes

I used to distinguish between my fiction and nonfiction in terms of superiority or inferiority.

In this very breath that we take now lies the secret that all great teachers try to tell us.

The purpose of our life is to help others through it.

Anyone who thinks they can save the world is both wrong and dangerous

Have you seen the snow leopard? No! Isn't that wonderful?

If we were doomed to live forever, we would scarcely be aware of the beauty around us.

Simultaneously I am myself, the child I was, the old man I will be.

The concept of conservation is a far truer sign of civilization than that spoilation of a continent which we once confused with progress.

How could I say that I wished to penetrate the secrets of the mountains in search of something still unknown that, like the yeti, might well be missed for the very fact of searching?

The Zen expression “Kill the Buddha!” means to kill any concept of the Buddha as something apart from oneself.

Be light, light, light - full of light!

Here I am, safely returned over those peaks from a journey far more beautiful and strange than anything I had hoped for or imagined - how is it that this safe return brings such regret?

Simplicity is the whole secret of well-being.

You do your best work when you're not conscious of yourself.

I like to hear and smell the countryside, the land that my characters inhabit. I don’t want these characters to step off the page, I want them to step out of the landscape.

In nonfiction, you have that limitation, that constraint, of telling the truth.

Illuminated by the same joyful curiosity and erudition, lyric writing, and plain love of life that made a classic of Archie Carr's The Windward Road.

Alec Wilkinson is a spare, clear, and lucid writer who works in stylistic simplicity with material that is not simple at all.

In zazen, one is one's present self, what one was, and what one will be, all at once.

My eye is fixed not on the ending of the book but on the feeling of that ending.

It is said in Java that the tiger's hearing is so acute that hunters must keep their nose hairs cut lest the tiger hear the breath whistle through their nostrils.

Figures dark beneath their loads pass down the far bank of the river, rendered immortal by the streak of sunset upon their shoulders

This world is painted on a wild dark metal

I think in any writing you're paying attention to detail.

I have never figured out how women work but I do know that their skin color has no significance. Black or white, every last one is pretty pink on the inside and they are all impossible.

There is a difference between right and wrong, always was and always will be, but each man's wrong and each man's right are different.

Webster said, ''Time them skeeters get done with that old man, his French blood will be all gone and he will speak American as good as we do.