Peter Matthiessen

“Transfixed by the bright gaze of a lizard, I become calm. This stone on which the lizard lies was under the sea…

— Peter Matthiessen

I was just very interested in the American frontier and the growth of capitalism - those enormous fortunes that were being made,…

— Peter Matthiessen

“There is a silence in the imminence of animals and also in the echo of their noise, but the dread silence is…

— Peter Matthiessen

For some time I watch the coming of the night? Above is the glistening galaxy of childhood, now hidden in the Western…

— Peter Matthiessen

“I think I must be disappointed, having come so far, and yet I do not feel that way. I am disappointed, and…

— Peter Matthiessen

“The purpose of meditation practice is not enlightenment; it is to pay attention even at unextraordinary times, to be of present, nothing-but-the-present,…

— Peter Matthiessen

“In the jungle, during one night in each month, the moths did not come to the lanterns; through the black reaches of…

— Peter Matthiessen

I have never figured out how women work but I do know that their skin color has no significance. Black or white,…

— Peter Matthiessen

“The light irradiates white peaks of Annapurna marching down the sky, in the great rampart that spreads east and west for eighteen…

— Peter Matthiessen

“THey were jeered and admired by both sides and were not shot at, for display and panoply were part of war, which…

— Peter Matthiessen

“In his first summers, forsaking all his toys, my son would stand rapt for nearly an hour in his sandbox in the…

— Peter Matthiessen

Zen is really just a reminder to stay alive and to be awake. We tend to daydream all the time, speculating about…

— Peter Matthiessen

I can watch elephants (and elephants alone) for hours at a time, for sooner or later the elephant will do something very…

— Peter Matthiessen

Soon the child’s clear eye is clouded over by ideas and opinions, preconceptions, and abstractions. Simple free being becomes encrusted with the…

— Peter Matthiessen

Amazingly, we take for granted that instinct for survival, fear of death, must separate us from the happiness of pure and uninterpreted…

— Peter Matthiessen

The ancient intuition that all matter, all "reality," is energy, that all phenomena, including time and space, are mere crystallizations of mind,…

— Peter Matthiessen

“I sit in meditation…and soon all sounds, and all one sees and feels, take on imminence, an immanence, as if the Universe…

— Peter Matthiessen

In fiction, you have a rough idea what's coming up next - sometimes you even make a little outline - but in…

— Peter Matthiessen

“In what is now known as Bodh Gaya…a Buddhist temple stands beside an ancient pipal, descended from that bodhi tree, or “enlightenment…

— Peter Matthiessen