Peter Matthiessen Quotes

35 quotes in 800 categories

• The purpose of meditation practice is not enlightenment; it is to pay attention even at extraordinary times, to be of the present, nothing-but-in-the-present, to bear…
• Here I am, safely returned over those peaks from a journey far more beautiful and strange than anything I had hoped for or imagined -…
• Simplicity is the whole secret of well-being.
• I meditate for the last time on this mountain that is bare, though others all around are white with snow. Like the bare peak of…
• This world is painted on a wild dark metal
• There's an elegiac quality in watching [American wilderness] go, because it's our own myth, the American frontier, that's deteriorating before our eyes. I feel a…
• My eye is fixed not on the ending of the book but on the feeling of that ending.
• Where to begin? Do we measure the relaxing of the feet? The moment when the eye glimpses the hawk, when instinct functions? For in this…
• The sun is roaring, it fills to bursting each crystal of snow. I flush with feeling, moved beyond my comprehension, and once again, the warm…
• 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…
• Amazingly, we take for granted that instinct for survival, fear of death, must separate us from the happiness of pure and uninterpreted experience, in which…
• Zen is really just a reminder to stay alive and to be awake. We tend to daydream all the time, speculating about the future and…
• In the clearness of this Himalayan air, mountains draw near, and in such splendor, tears come quietly to my eyes and cool on my sunburned…
• 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…
• Simultaneously I am myself, the child I was, the old man I will be.
• When I'm in the field, when I'm working, I keep very careful notes. I wear big shirts with big breast pockets, and I carry in…
• In fiction, you have a rough idea what's coming up next - sometimes you even make a little outline - but in fact you don't…
• The great stillness in these landscapes that once made me restless seeps into me day by day, and with it the unreasonable feeling that I…
• 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…
• If we were doomed to live forever, we would scarcely be aware of the beauty around us.

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