All Peter Matthiessen Quotes
- 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… Attention
- Here I am, safely returned over those peaks from a journey far more beautiful and strange than anything I had hoped for or imagined -… Beautiful
- Simplicity is the whole secret of well-being. Secret
- 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… All
- This world is painted on a wild dark metal Dark
- 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… American
- My eye is fixed not on the ending of the book but on the feeling of that ending. Book
- 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… Action
- 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… Air
- 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… All
- 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… Air
- 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… Alive
- 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… Ago
- 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… Fact
- Simultaneously I am myself, the child I was, the old man I will be. Child
- 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… Big
- 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… Coming
- 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… Day
- 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… Character
- If we were doomed to live forever, we would scarcely be aware of the beauty around us. Aware
- You do your best work when you're not conscious of yourself. Best
- The purpose of our life is to help others through it. Help
- In nonfiction, you have that limitation, that constraint, of telling the truth. Constraint
- 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… Acute
- I was just very interested in the American frontier and the growth of capitalism - those enormous fortunes that were being made, more often than… American