"I made myself pay attention to places where I thought nothing was going on... then after a while, the landscape materialized in a fuller way. Its expression was deeper and broader than I had first imagined  at first glance." Barry Lopez

 “My originality consists in ... the logic of the visible at the service of the invisible.” Odilon Redon

 "A man must dream a long time in order to act in grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness."
Jean Genet

 "The soul speaks its truth only under quiet, inviting, and trustworthy conditions.
The soul is like a wild animal — tough, resilient, savvy, self-sufficient, and yet exceedingly shy. If we want to see a wild animal, the last thing we should do is to go crashing through the woods, shouting for the creature to come out. But if we are willing to walk quietly into the woods and sit silently for an hour or two at the base of a tree, the creature we are waiting for may well emerge, and out of the corner of an eye we will catch a glimpse of the precious wildness we seek." Parker Palmer

"And suddenly I apprehend in it the dark proposal of the ground. Under the fallen leaf my breastbone burns with imminent decay. Other leaves fall. My body begins its long shudder into hummus. I feel my substance escape me, carried into the mold by beetles and worms. Days, winds, seasons pass over me as is ink under the leaves. For a time only sight is left me, a passive awareness of the sky overhead, birds crossing, the mazed inter reaching of the treetops, the leaves falling - and then that, too, sinks away. It is acceptable to me, and I am at peace."
From Wendell Berry’S 1968 essay entitled “A Native Hill”

"... the thing I love best in literature. It takes a personal question (or a moment of doubt could be another way of thinking about it) and interrogates lines of inquiry surrounding that question, historically and psychologically. After a while the answer is known but it no longer matters because the expanding life of the question is what keeps us reading. This is the kind of book that demands I slow down the closer I get to its end, preparing myself for the loss of the speaker in my world." Claudia Rankine

“The songs of the guardians of silence

are the most powerful.” Joy Harjo