Quotes by Peter Matthiessen - Page 1 | QuoteForever

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Be light, light, light - full of light!
Peter Matthiessen / Novelist
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This world is painted on a wild dark metal
Peter Matthiessen / Novelist
Dark
This World
World
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Simplicity is the whole secret of well-being.
Peter Matthiessen / Novelist
Secret
Simple
Simplicity
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The purpose of our life is to help others through it.
Peter Matthiessen / Novelist
Helping Others
Life Is
Purpose
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Have you seen the snow leopard? No! Isn't that wonderful?
Peter Matthiessen / Novelist
Leopards
Snow
Wonderful
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I think in any writing you're paying attention to detail.
Peter Matthiessen / Novelist
Details
Thinking
Writing
Detail
Paying
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You do your best work when you're not conscious of yourself.
Peter Matthiessen / Novelist
Best Work
Consciousness
Self Conscious
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Simultaneously I am myself, the child I was, the old man I will be.
Peter Matthiessen / Novelist
Men
Children
Old Man
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Anyone who thinks they can save the world is both wrong and dangerous
Peter Matthiessen / Novelist
Dangerous
Thinking
World
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In nonfiction, you have that limitation, that constraint, of telling the truth.
Peter Matthiessen / Novelist
Truth
Constraints
Fiction And Nonfiction
Limitation
Nonfiction
Telling The Truth
Constraint
Telling
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My eye is fixed not on the ending of the book but on the feeling of that ending.
Peter Matthiessen / Novelist
Book
Eye
Feelings
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In zazen, one is one's present self, what one was, and what one will be, all at once.
Peter Matthiessen / Novelist
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If we were doomed to live forever, we would scarcely be aware of the beauty around us.
Peter Matthiessen / Novelist
Doomed
Forever
Live Forever
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In this very breath that we take now lies the secret that all great teachers try to tell us.
Peter Matthiessen / Novelist
Teacher
Lying
Spiritual
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I used to distinguish between my fiction and nonfiction in terms of superiority or inferiority.
Peter Matthiessen / Novelist
Fiction
Inferiority
Nonfiction
Superiority
Used
Distinguish
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The Zen expression “Kill the Buddha!” means to kill any concept of the Buddha as something apart from oneself.
Peter Matthiessen / Novelist
Expression
Mean
Oneself
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Alec Wilkinson is a spare, clear, and lucid writer who works in stylistic simplicity with material that is not simple at all.
Peter Matthiessen / Novelist
Clear
Simple
Simplicity
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Figures dark beneath their loads pass down the far bank of the river, rendered immortal by the streak of sunset upon their shoulders
Peter Matthiessen / Novelist
Dark
Rivers
Sunset
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The concept of conservation is a far truer sign of civilization than that spoilation of a continent which we once confused with progress.
Peter Matthiessen / Novelist
Civilization
Confused
Progress
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Illuminated by the same joyful curiosity and erudition, lyric writing, and plain love of life that made a classic of Archie Carr's The Windward Road.
Peter Matthiessen / Novelist
Curiosity
Love Life
Writing
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When I'm in the field, when I'm working, I keep very careful notes. I wear big shirts with big breast pockets, and I carry in them two little spiral notebooks.
Peter Matthiessen / Novelist
Notebook
Careful
Littles
Pockets
Shirts
Two
Carry
Notebooks
Spiral
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It is said in Java that the tiger's hearing is so acute that hunters must keep their nose hairs cut lest the tiger hear the breath whistle through their nostrils.
Peter Matthiessen / Novelist
Cutting
Hair
Listening
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I like to hear and smell the countryside, the land that my characters inhabit. I don’t want these characters to step off the page, I want them to step out of the landscape.
Peter Matthiessen / Novelist
Character
Land
Smell
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How could I say that I wished to penetrate the secrets of the mountains in search of something still unknown that, like the yeti, might well be missed for the very fact of searching?
Peter Matthiessen / Novelist
Mountain
Secret
Yeti
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Here I am, safely returned over those peaks from a journey far more beautiful and strange than anything I had hoped for or imagined - how is it that this safe return brings such regret?
Peter Matthiessen / Novelist
Journey
Travel
Beautiful
Regret
Return
Safe
Strange
Had
Those
Brings
Far
Hoped
Over
Peaks
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I have never figured out how women work but I do know that their skin color has no significance. Black or white, every last one is pretty pink on the inside and they are all impossible.
Peter Matthiessen / Novelist
Black
Skin Color
White
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In fiction, you have a rough idea what's coming up next - sometimes you even make a little outline - but in fact you don't know. Each day is a whole new - and for me, a very invigorating - experience.
Peter Matthiessen / Novelist
Each Day
Fiction
Ideas
Invigorating
Rough
Writing
Experience Me Day
Outline
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The great stillness in these landscapes that once made me restless seeps into me day by day, and with it the unreasonable feeling that I have found what I was searching for without ever having discovered what it was.
Peter Matthiessen / Novelist
Feelings
Landscape
Restless
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The purpose of meditation practice is not enlightenment; it is to pay attention even at extraordinary times, to be of the present, nothing-but-in-the-present, to bear this mindfulness of now into each event of ordinary life.
Peter Matthiessen / Novelist
Enlightenment
Events
Meditation Practice
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Where to begin? Do we measure the relaxing of the feet? The moment when the eye glimpses the hawk, when instinct functions? For in this pure action, this pure moving of the bird, there is no time, no space, but only the free doing-being of this very moment -now!
Peter Matthiessen / Novelist
Eye
Feet
Moving
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For some time I watch the coming of the night? Above is the glistening galaxy of childhood, now hidden in the Western world by air pollution and the glare of artificial light; for my children's children, the power, peace and healing of the night will be obliterated.
Peter Matthiessen / Novelist
Children
Healing
Night
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I was just very interested in the American frontier and the growth of capitalism - those enormous fortunes that were being made, more often than not, on the blood of poor people, black people, Indian people. They were the ones who paid very dearly for those great fortunes.
Peter Matthiessen / Novelist
Black
Blood
Enormous
Indian
Paid
People
Poor People
Dearly
Fortunes
Frontier
Indian People
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And only the enlightened can recall their former lives; for the rest of us, the memories of past existences are but glints of light, twinges of longing, passing shadows, disturbingly familiar, that are gone before they can be grasped, like the passage of that silver bird on Dhaulagiri.
Peter Matthiessen / Novelist
Light
Memories
Past
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I ... had what Kierkegaard called 'the sickness of infinitude,' wandering from one path to another with no real recognition that I was embarked upon a search, and scarcely a clue as to what I might be after. I only knew that at the bottom of each breath there was a hollow place that needed to be filled.
Peter Matthiessen / Novelist
Might
Path
Real
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The sun is roaring, it fills to bursting each crystal of snow. I flush with feeling, moved beyond my comprehension, and once again, the warm tears freeze upon my face. These rocks and mountains, all this matter, the snow itself, the air- the earth is ringing. All is moving, full of power, full of light.
Peter Matthiessen / Novelist
Light
Moving
Rocks
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There's an elegiac quality in watching [American wilderness] go, because it's our own myth, the American frontier, that's deteriorating before our eyes. I feel a deep sorrow that my kids will never get to see what I've seen, and their kids will see nothing; there's a deep sadness whenever I look at nature now.
Peter Matthiessen / Novelist
Kids
Eye
Sadness
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It is related that Sakyamuni [the historical Buddha] once dismissed as of small consequence a feat of levitation on the part of a disciple, and cried out in pity for a yogin by the river who had spent twenty years of his human existence learning to walk on water, when the ferryman might have taken him across for a small coin.
Peter Matthiessen / Novelist
Rivers
Taken
Years
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It's a simplification to say that the men [during Stone Age] went to war to maintain their dominance over the women. The men would help dig agricultural ditches because they were superb farmers. That was very heavy lifting work. But then they just preened themselves, and put bird-of-paradise plumes [in their hair], and smoked dope.
Peter Matthiessen / Novelist
Men
War
Dope
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I can watch elephants (and elephants alone) for hours at a time, for sooner or later the elephant will do something very strange... There is mystery behind that masked gray visage, and ancient life force, delicate and mighty, awesome and enchanted, commanding the silence ordinarily reserved for mountain peaks, great fires, and the sea.
Peter Matthiessen / Novelist
Inspirational
Motivational
Animal
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Zen is really just a reminder to stay alive and to be awake. We tend to daydream all the time, speculating about the future and dwelling on the past. Zen practice is about appreciating your life in this moment. If you are truly aware of five minutes a day, then you are doing pretty well. We are beset by both the future and the past, and there is no reality apart from the here and now.
Peter Matthiessen / Novelist
Dwelling
Past
Reality
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You see ... a man like me, a cautious man, has his life all figured out according to a pattern, and then the pattern flies apart. You run around for quite a while trying to repair it, until one day you straighten up again with an armful of broken pieces, and you see that the world has gone on without you and you can never catch up with your old life, and you must begin all over again.
Peter Matthiessen / Novelist
Running
Men
Broken
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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.
Peter Matthiessen / Novelist
Children
Ideas
Past
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Soon the child’s clear eye is clouded over by ideas and opinions, preconceptions, and abstractions. Simple free being becomes encrusted with the burdensome armor of the ego. Not until years later does an instinct come that a vital sense of mystery has been withdrawn. The sun glints through the pines and the heart is pierced in a moment of beauty and strange pain, like a memory of paradise. After that day, we become seekers.
Peter Matthiessen / Novelist
Beauty
Life
Pain
Spiritual
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The mystical perception (which is only "mystical" if reality is limited to what can be measured by the intellect and senses) is remarkably consistent in all ages and all places. All phenomena are processes, connections, all is in flux...have the mind screens knocked away to see there is no real edge to anything, that in the endless interpenetration of the universe, a molecular flow, a cosmic energy shimmers in all stone and steel as well as flesh.
Peter Matthiessen / Novelist
Mind
Perception
Real
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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. This retreat from wonder, the backing away like lobsters into safe crannies, the desperate instinct that our life passes unlived, is reflected in proliferation without joy, corrosive money rot, the gross befouling of the earth and air and water from which we came.
Peter Matthiessen / Novelist
Air
Joy
Water
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I meditate for the last time on this mountain that is bare, though others all around are white with snow. Like the bare peak of the koan, this one is not different from myself. I know this mountain because I am this mountain, I can feel it breathing at this moment, as its grass tops stray against the snows. If the snow leopard should leap from the rock above and manifest itself before me - S-A-A-O! - then in that moment of pure fright, out of my wits, I might truly perceive it, and be free.
Peter Matthiessen / Novelist
Nature
Time
Rocks
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The secret of the mountain is that the mountains simply exist, as I do myself: the mountains exist simply, which I do not. The mountains have no "meaning," they are meaning; the mountains are. The sun is round. I ring with life, and the mountains ring, and when I can hear it, there is a ringing that we share. I understand all this, not in my mind but in my heart, knowing how meaningless it is to try to capture what cannot be expressed, knowing that mere words will remain when I read it all again, another day.
Peter Matthiessen / Novelist
Heart
Knowing
Secret
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In the clearness of this Himalayan air, mountains draw near, and in such splendor, tears come quietly to my eyes and cool on my sunburned cheeks. this is not mere soft-mindedness, nor am I all that silly with the altitude. My head has cleared in these weeks free of intrusions- mail, telephones, people and their needs- and I respond to things spontaneously, without defensive or self-conscious screens. Still, all this feeling is astonishing: not so long ago I could say truthfully that I had not shed a tear in twenty years.
Peter Matthiessen / Novelist
Eye
Long Ago
Silly
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The ancient intuition that all matter, all "reality," is energy, that all phenomena, including time and space, are mere crystallizations of mind, is an idea with which few physicists have quarreled since the theory of relativity first called into question the separate identities of energy and matter. 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 he pervasive energy that animates the electron.
Peter Matthiessen / Novelist
Space
Ideas
Reality
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