“Many of us seem to live our lives looking for happiness. That is not always a bad thing, but it can be if we continually believe that happiness is someplace else and not in the present.”

“Don't look to a husband or a child or a friend or your family to make you happy. It is not within their capacity to do so.”

“We have all lost our possessions and many of us our homes," he said. "But these losses, severe though they may seem, remind us of what no person can take, and that is our minds and our imaginations.”

“People need wild places. Whether or not we think we do, we do. We need to be able to taste grace and know again that we desire it. We need to experience a landscape that is timeless, whose agenda moves at the pace of speciation and glaciers. To be surrounded by a singing, mating, howling commotion of other species, all of which love their lives as much as we do ours, and none of which could possibly care less about us in our place. It reminds us that our plans are small and somewhat absurd. It reminds us why, in those cases in which our plans might influence many future generations, we ought to choose carefully. Looking out on a clean plank of planet earth, we can get shaken right down to the bone by the bronze-eyed possibility of lives that are not our own.”

“We look for happiness in every other thing and being around us. We live in an “if and then” model of happiness. If that happens, then I will be happy. This list of “if and then” never finishes, and we continue through our entire life learning how to be unhappy.”

“We all live with our losses. We don't want to, but we can”

“Looking out on a clean plank of planet earth, we can get shaken right down to the bone by the bronze-eyed possibility of lives that are not our own.”