Bottom Quote by Peter Matthiessen

Alec Wilkinson is a spare, clear, and lucid writer who works in stylistic simplicity with material that is not simple at all.

— Peter Matthiessen

Figures dark beneath their loads pass down the far bank of the river, rendered immortal by the streak of sunset upon their shoulders

— Peter Matthiessen

I think in any writing you're paying attention to detail.

— Peter Matthiessen

The great stillness in these landscapes that once made me restless seeps into me day by day, and with it the unreasonable feeling that…

— Peter Matthiessen

“...experience was static in the valley; it was older than time itself, for time was a thing of but two generations, dated by moons…

— Peter Matthiessen

“The central feature of the practice of meditation and hard work known as Zen is that, as Matthiessen says, it “has no patience with…

— Peter Matthiessen

Be light, light, light - full of light!

— Peter Matthiessen

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

— Peter Matthiessen

“Nonfiction at its best is like fashioning a cabinet. It can be elegant and very beautiful but it can never be sculpture. Captive to…

— 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 burdensome armor…

— Peter Matthiessen

“In the book of Job, the Lord demands, “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?” “I was there!”-surely that is…

— Peter Matthiessen

I meditate for the last time on this mountain that is bare, though others all around are white with snow. Like the bare peak…

— Peter Matthiessen