11 quotes
Amazingly, we take for granted that instinct for survival, fear of death, must separate us from the happiness of pure and uninterpreted experience, in which body, mind, and nature are the same.
The Snow Leopard (1978)
Yet that light is always present, like the stars of noon. Man must perceive it if he is to transcend his fear of meaningless, for no amount of “progress” can take its place.
The Snow Leopard (1978)
I have often tried to isolate that quality of "Zen" which attracted me so powerfully to its literature and later to the practice of zazen.
Nine-Headed Dragon River: Zen Journals 1969-1982 (1986)
Zen has been called the "religion before religion," which is to say that anyone can practice, including those committed to another faith.
Nine-Headed Dragon River: Zen Journals 1969-1982 (1986)
Today most scientists would agree with the ancient Hindus that nothing exists or is destroyed, things merely change shape or form; that matter is insubstantial in origin, a temporary aggregate of the pervasive energy that animates the electron.
The Snow Leopard (1978)
For the writer, therefore the reader, fresh truth is exhilarating, even painful truth, as in Kafka or Céline.
The Paris Review interview (1999)
I am a writer. A fiction writer who also writes nonfiction on behalf of social and environmental causes or journals about expeditions to wild places.
The Paris Review interview (1999)
What I’m trying to describe, I guess, is conflagration, a life burning up, as lives do in Dostoyevsky. Obsession that isn’t crazed or criminal is always enthralling.
The Paris Review interview (1999)
The insights and epigrams of Alexander Pope weren’t clichés when he wrote them, any more than those resounding lines in Shakespeare. They only became dog-eared from overuse.
The Paris Review interview (1999)
When we are mired in the relative world, never lifting our gaze to the mystery, our life is stunted, incomplete; we are filled with yearning for that paradise that is lost when, as young children, we replace it with words and ideas and abstractions — such as merit, such as past, present, and future — our direct, spontaneous experience of the thing itself, in the beauty and precision of this present moment. We identify, label, and interpret our surroundings as abstract concepts, quite separate from another concept, which is our own separate identity and ego.
Nine-Headed Dragon River: Zen Journals 1969-1982 (1986)
In another life — this isn’t what I know, but how I feel — these mountains were my home; there is a rising of forgotten knowledge, like a spring from hidden aquifers under the earth. To glimpse one’s own true nature is a kind of homegoing, to a place East of the Sun, West of the Moon — the homegoing that needs no home, like that waterfall on the upper Suli Gad that turns to mist before touching the earth and rises once again into the sky.
The Snow Leopard (1978)