I never find words right away. Poems for me always begin with images and rhythms, shapes, feelings, forms, dances in the back of my mind.

Nature is not a place to visit. It is home.

Walking is the great adventure, the first meditation, a practice of heartiness and soul primary to humankind. Walking is the exact balance beween spirit and humility.

Find your place on the planet. Dig in, and take responsibility from there.

Wildness It is perennially within us, dormant as a hard-shelled seed, awaiting the fire or flood that awakes it again.

Range after range of mountains. Year after year after year. I am still in love.

Nature is orderly. That which appears to be chaotic in nature is only a more complex kind of order.

When the mind is exhausted of images, it invents its own.

I hold the most archaic values on earth ... the fertility of the soul, the magic of the animals, the power-vision in solitude.... the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe.

The lessons we learn from the wild become the etiquette of freedom.

Three-fourths of philosophy and literature is the talk of people trying to convince themselves that they really like the cage they were tricked into entering.

You are not supposed to be here in this world and not leave something for which you could be called great.

God should always be our first thought, not our last resort.

Do you know what it's like to give your whole self to a person, and your whole heart to boot, until you've got nothing left to give- and then realize that it still isn't whay they need?

Some of us had been running all our lives. We ran because we could and because we could not. We ran for our lives. We still thought they were worth running for.

Love is strong as death jealousy is cruel as the grave.

If you must love your neighbor as yourself it is at least as fair to love yourself as your neighbor.

We do not see nature with our eyes, but with our understandings and our hearts.

Family, to me, is most important, and I can't wait to have one of my own, but I am not going to rush into it. I don't want to get a divorce. I want to take my time, do it once and get it right.

You can believe in God without believing in immortality, but it is hard to see how anyone can believe in immortality and not believe in God.

The Lord who gave us Earth and Heaven Takes that as thanks for all He's given. The book he lent is given back All blotted red and smutted black.