Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters Quotes

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

I would like to learn, or remember, how to live.

Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

She is nine, beloved, as open-faced as the sky and as self-contained. I have watched her grow. As recently as three or four years ago, she had a young child's perfectly shallow receptiveness; she fitted into the world of time, it fitted into her, as ...

Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

It is difficult to undo our own damage, and to recall to our presence that which we have asked to leave. It is hard to desecrate a grove and change your mind. The very holy mountains are keeping mum. We doused the burning bush and cannot rekindle it;...

Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

There was only silence. It was the silence of matter caught in the act and embarrassed. There were no cells moving, and yet there were cells. I could see the shape of the land, how it lay holding silence. Its poise and its stillness were unendurable,...

Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

Silence is not our heritage but our destiny; we live where we want to live.

Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

I alternate between thinking of the planet as home - dear and familiar stone hearth and garden - and as a hard land of exile in which we are all sojourners.

Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

The mountains are great stone bells; they clang together like nuns. Who shushed the stars? There are a thousand million galaxies easily seen in the Palomar reflector; collisions between and among them do, of course, occur. But these collisions are ve...

Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

The soul may ask God for anything, and never fail.

Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

What have we been doing all these centuries but trying to call God back to the mountain, or, failing that, raise a peep out of anything that isn't us? What is the difference between a cathedral and a physics lab? Are not they both saying: Hello? We s...

Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

We are here to witness. There is nothing else to do with those mute materials we do not need. Until Larry teaches his stone to talk, until God changes his mind, or until the pagan gods slip back to their hilltop groves, all we can do with the whole i...

Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

You do not have to sit outside in the dark. If, however, you want to look at the stars, you will find that darkness is necessary. But the stars neither require nor demand it.

Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

Nature's silence is its one remark, and every flake of world is a chip off that old mute and immutable block. The Chiense say that we live in the world of ten thousand things. Each of the ten thousand things cries out to us precisely nothing.

Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

Geography is the key, the crucial accident of birth. A piece of protein could be a snail, a sea lion, or a systems analyst, but it had to start somewhere. This is not science; it is merely metaphor. And the landscape in which the protein "starts" sha...

Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

Could two live that way? Could two live under the wild rose, and explore by the pond, so that the smooth mind of each is as everywhere present to the other, and as received and as unchallenged, as falling snow?

Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

Nature's silence is its one remark, and every flake of world is a chip off that old mute and immutable block.

Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

What is the difference between a cathedral and a physics lab? Are not they both saying: Hello? We spy on whales and on interstellar radio objects; we starve ourselves and pray till we're blue.

Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

In the deeps are the violence and terror of which psychology has warned us. But if you ride these monsters deeper down, if you drop with them farther over the world's rim, you find what our sciences cannot locate or name, the substrate, the ocean or ...

Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

The silence is not suppression; instead, it is all there is.

Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters