"If it is your nature to be happy you will swim away along the soft trails for hours, your imagination alighting everywhere." – morning poem

"Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting — over and over announcing your place in the family of things." – wildgeese

"What good does it do to lie all day in the sun loving what is easy? It never grew easy, but at last I grew peaceful: all summer my fear diminished as they bloomed through the water like flowers, like flecks of an uncertain dream, while I lay on the rocks, reaching into the darkness, learning little by little to love our only world." – starfish

"But little by little, as you left their voices behind, the stars began to burn through the sheets of clouds, and there was a new voice, which you slowly recognized as your own, that kept you company as you strode deeper and deeper into the world, determined to do the only thing you could do — determined to save the only life you could save." – the journey

"For years and years I struggled just to love my life. And then the butterfly rose, weightless, in the wind. “Don’t love your life too much,” it said, and vanished into the world." – one or two things

"Every morning I walk like this around the pond, thinking: if the doors of my heart ever close, I am as good as dead. Every morning, so far, I’m alive." – landscape