The uplands of my home country in north central Kentucky are sloping and easily eroded, dependent for safekeeping upon year-round cover of perennial plants.

People are fed by the food industry, which pays no attention to health, and are treated by the health industry, which pays no attention to food.

The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope.

It may be that when we no longer know... which way to go we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.

Outdoors we are confronted everywhere with wonders; we see that the miraculous is not extraordinary, but the common mode of existence. It is our daily bread.

Be like the fox who makes more tracks than necessary, some in the wrong direction. Practice resurrection.

I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.... For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

We need better government, no doubt about it. But we also need better minds, better friendships, better marriages, better communities.

You cannot save the land apart from the people, or the people apart from the land.

Unexpected wonders happen, not on schedule, or when you expect or want them to happen, but if you keep hanging around, they do happen.

Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.

Give me an enthusiastic, purpose-oriented person and I will give a successful future leader.

The attraction of reading is that it allows you to live, for a few hours, as someone else—grants you access to their head, their thoughts, their secrets.

When you act without feeling, that's the living death.

I think he'll be to Rome as is the osprey to the fish, who takes it by sovereignty of nature.

I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.

I've voted in some cases to remove and reduce tax breaks for the oil industry in other cases I've voted not to because I felt that the proposals covered too much.

What makes a great endurance athlete is the ability to absorb potential embarrassment, and to suffer without complaint.

religion is poetry, - poetry is religion.

If there's an idea I think is really good and I feel like I can write it, then I'll do it.

I don't think I have ever created an entire fiction piece or followed a historical piece and made that into a sermon.