“All those years and their moments—Crackling bacon, slamming car doors,Poems tried out on friends,Will be one more archive,One more shaky text.”

“Damn me not I make a better fool. And there is nothing vaster, more beautiful, remote, unthinking (eternal rose-red sunrise on the surf—great rectitude of rocks) than man, inhuman man, At whom I look for a thousand light years from a seat near Scorpio, amazed and touched by his concern and pity for my plight, a simple star, Then trading shapes again. My wife is gone, my girl is gone, my books are loaned, my clothes are worn, I gave away a car; and all that happened years ago. Mind & matter, love & space are frail as foam on beer.”

“In the 40,000 year time scale we're all the same people. We're all equally primitive, give or take two or three thousand years here or a hundred years there.”

“Being the StreamMeditation is not just a rest or retreat from the turmoil of thestream or the impurity of the world. It is a way of being the stream,so that one can be at home in both the white water and the eddies.Meditation may take one out of the world, but it also puts one totallyinto it.”

“When men see Han-shanThey all say he's crazyAnd not much to look at -Dressed in rags and hides.They don't get what I sayAnd I don't talk their language.All I can say to those I meet:"Try and make it to Cold Mountain.”

“As a poet I hold the most archaic values on earth . . . the fertility of the soil, the magic of animals, the power-vision in solitude, the terrifying initiation and rebirth, the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe. I try to hold both history and the wilderness in mind, that my poems may approach the true measure of things and stand against the unbalance and ignorance of our times.”

“Nature is orderly. That which appears to be chaotic in nature is only a more complex kind of order.”