“Teachers must, I discovered, have a gift to teach and the compulsion to use it. And faith. Anything less won't carry you through.”

“C.S. Lewis admitted, when he was asked to set forth his beliefs, that he never felt less sure of them than when he tried to speak of them. Photographers know this frailty. To them words are a pallid, diffuse way of describing and celebrating what matters. Their gift is to see what will be affecting as a print. Mute. ”

“The issue is not just that land developers have unbalanced the ecology and made much of the geography ugly. What strikes so painfully is, at least in the perspective of our brief lives, they have destroyed the places where we became, and would like to continue to become, ourselves.”

“How can we hope, after all, to see a tree or rock or clear north sky if we do not adopt a little of their mode of life, a little of their time?...if the time it takes to cross space is a way by which we define it, then to arrive at a view of space "in no time" is to have denied its reality...”

“We catch ourselves thinking, in the bitterness that can accompany the unexpected sound of an aluminum can bending underfoot, that it would have been merciful if Columbus had been wrong and the world flat, with an edge from which to fall, rather than a circular cage that returns us to our mistakes. The geography seems hopeless.”

“...if we consider the difference between William Henry Jackson packing in his cameras by mule, and the person stepping out of his car to take a picture with an Instamatic, it becomes clear how some of our space has vanished; if the time it takes to cross space is a way by which we define it, then to arrive at a view of space 'in no time' is to have denied its reality.”

“If as individuals we can improve the geography only slightly, if at all, perhaps the more appropriately scaled subject for reshaping is ourselves.”