Top 76 Peter Matthiessen Quotes
#1. 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
#2. Sometimes the women much resent the men who call for war and have been known to rush upon them and beat them severely about the head and shoulders.
Peter Matthiessen
#3. Watson loved them sour kind of jokes, which I enjoyed myself. I mean, ain't life some kind of a sour joke? Might's well laugh, that's the way him and me seen it, whether nice folks seen the joke or not. One time when Watson caught me grinning along with him, he give a wink and lifted up his hat.
Peter Matthiessen
#4. And as the wary dogs skirt past, we nod, grimace, and resume our paths to separate destinies and graves.
Peter Matthiessen
#5. Alec Wilkinson is a spare, clear, and lucid writer who works in stylistic simplicity with material that is not simple at all.
Peter Matthiessen
#6. After four hundred years of betrayals and excuses, Indians recognize the new fashion in racism, which is to pretend that the real Indians are all gone.
Peter Matthiessen
#7. In the gaunt, brown face in the mirror - unseen since late September - the blue eyes in a monkish skull seem eerily clear, but this is the face of a man I do not know.
Peter Matthiessen
#8. I was overtaken by a dread of utter solitude in the great turning world.
Peter Matthiessen
#9. This man would rob them graves himself, being some way starved by life, bone greedy.
Peter Matthiessen
#10. 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
#11. Simultaneously I am myself, the child I was, the old man I will be.
Peter Matthiessen
#12. My eye is fixed not on the ending of the book but on the feeling of that ending.
Peter Matthiessen
#13. The Zen expression "Kill the Buddha!" means to kill any concept of the Buddha as something apart from oneself.
Peter Matthiessen
#14. And perhaps this is what Tukten knows - that the journey to Dolpo, step by step and day by day, is the Jewel in the Heart of the Lotus, the Tao, the Way, the Path, but no more so than small events of days at home.
Peter Matthiessen
#15. 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
#16. Experience was static in the valley; it was older than time itself, for time was a thing of but two generations, dated by moons and ending with the day in which he found himself.
Peter Matthiessen
#17. Man wants the truth about Ed Watson," Daniels jeered. "Where you aim to find it? Smallwoods'll tell you their truth, Hardens'll tell you theirs. Fat-ass guard out there, he'll tell you his and I'll give you another. Which one you aim to settle for and make your peace with?
Peter Matthiessen
#18. Small bits of life crawled and flew about the ward on ancient business.
Peter Matthiessen
#19. Home was that lone house on its great bend of Chatham River, no destination anymore but only the source of a vague sadness he thought of as "homegoing," a returning to the lost paradise of true belonging.
Peter Matthiessen
#20. Huntin too hard for the truth ain't a good idea, y'know," he added. "By the time you stumble over it, it ain't the truth no more. Unless there's death in it. I reckon death is about as close to truth as a man can come.
Peter Matthiessen
#21. Though a few older men cut fingers in time of grief, it is usually the smallest girls who are selected for this ceremony, and a woman in the valley whose left hand is not a stump is very rare.
Peter Matthiessen
#23. In the jungle, during one night in each month, the moths did not come to the lanterns; through the black reaches of the outer night, so it was said, they flew toward the full moon.
Peter Matthiessen
#24. Trouble was, they never let on to their sons how scared they was - so scared they forgot the color of a man because he could outshoot the man who scared 'em. And bein ashamed, they never talked about it or discussed it in the family.
Peter Matthiessen
#25. Well, he was scarcely a parfit gentil knight; as Wolfie said, he looked like some Hollywood Geronimo trying to kick a ninety-dollar habit.
Peter Matthiessen
#26. We have outsmarted ourselves, like greedy monkeys, and now we are full of dread.
Peter Matthiessen
#27. There are no roads west of Pohkara, which is the last outpost of the modern world; in one days walk we are a century away.
Peter Matthiessen
#28. White crescents beneath the pupils made his pale blue eyes seem to protrude, though they did not: lacking depth, they appeared to be inset into the skin like stones in hide.
Peter Matthiessen
#29. In sexual abandon as in danger we are impelled, however briefly, into that vital present in which we do not stand apart from life, we ARE life, our being fills us, in ecstasy with another being, loneliness falls away into eternity. But in other days, such union was attainable through simple awe.
Peter Matthiessen
#30. 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.
Peter Matthiessen
#31. The sun, coming hard around the world: the island rises from the sea, sinks, rises, holds.
Peter Matthiessen
#32. If we were doomed to live forever, we would scarcely be aware of the beauty around us.
Peter Matthiessen
#33. This is a fine chance to let go, to "win my life by losing it," which means not recklessness but acceptance, not passivity but nonattachment.
Peter Matthiessen
#34. Anyone who thinks they can save the world is both wrong and dangerous
Peter Matthiessen
#35. In zazen, one is one's present self, what one was, and what one will be, all at once.
Peter Matthiessen
#36. In this very breath that we take now lies the secret that all great teachers try to tell us.
Peter Matthiessen
#39. I nod to Death in passing, aware of the sound of my own feet upon my path. The
Peter Matthiessen
#40. 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
#42. And it is a profound consolation, perhaps the only one, to this haunted animal that wastes most of a long and ghostly life wandering the future and the past on its hind legs, looking for meanings, only to see in the eyes of others of its kind that it must die.
Peter Matthiessen
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. For people who must live from day to day, past and future have small relevance, and their grasp of it is fleeting; they live in the moment, a very precious gift that we have lost.
Peter Matthiessen
#46. Transfixed by the bright gaze of a lizard, I become calm. This stone on which the lizard lies was under the sea when lizards first came into being, and now the flood is wearing it away, to return it once again into the oceans.
Peter Matthiessen
#48. free life" as described by a mountaineer: "The mountains had been a natural field of activity where, playing on the frontiers of life and death, we had found the freedom for which we were blindly groping and which was as necessary to us as breath.
Peter Matthiessen
#49. There is a difference between right and wrong, always was and always will be, but each man's wrong and each man's right are different.
Peter Matthiessen
#50. Life begins before a soul is born and commences once again with the act of dying, and as in the Afro-Asian symbol of the snake of eternity swallowing its tail, all is in flux, all comes full circle, with no beginning and no end.
Peter Matthiessen
#52. 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
#53. It is difficult to adjust because I do not know who is adjusting; I am no longer that old person and not yet the new.
Peter Matthiessen
#54. 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
#55. The pig had been killed because spirits, like people, cannot resist the smell of cooking pig.
Peter Matthiessen
#56. In this toxic atmosphere, good intentions are eroding like the noses of stone gargoyles on cathedral peaks.
Peter Matthiessen
#57. His sunrise mood evaporated with the dew, giving way to restlessness, disquiet. All his life, Lucius's moods had been prey to shifts of light, and now a leaden melancholy dragged at his spirits.
Peter Matthiessen
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. The boy Weneluke wove hand patterns with a string, working skillfully into abstract designs on all eight fingers: one of these represented a man and woman facing each other, and, by manipulating each sex, he arrived at a nice parody of copulation.
Peter Matthiessen
#62. Webster said, 'Time them skeeters get done with that old man, his French blood will be all gone and he will speak American as good as we do.
Peter Matthiessen
#63. I used to distinguish between my fiction and nonfiction in terms of superiority or inferiority.
Peter Matthiessen
#64. Webster growled a Webster kind of prayer: "God Almighty, here is two more meek that has inherited Your earth." Webster spoke in his own peculiar way; we never did learn how to hear him.
Peter Matthiessen
#65. 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
#67. Mistaking Lucius's silence for acquiescence, he pointed a hard finger at his eyes. Maybe nobody don't need this truth you're lookin for, ever think about that?
Peter Matthiessen
#68. Nonfiction at its best is like fashioning a cabinet. It can never be a sculpture. It can be elegant and very beautiful, but it can never be sculpture. Captive to facts - or predetermined form - it cannot fly.
Peter Matthiessen
#69. The equatorial monsoons which brought a rainy season to the coasts had small effect here in the highlands, from moon to moon, the rainfall varied little. Winter, summer, autumn, spring were involuted, turning in upon themselves, a slow circling of time.
Peter Matthiessen
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. In nonfiction, you have that limitation, that constraint, of telling the truth.
Peter Matthiessen
#73. The shadow of sharks is the shadow of death, and they call forth dim ultimate fears. Yet there is something holy in their silence.
Peter Matthiessen
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. I'm surprised you holy people talk to me," Wolfie said suddenly, "after what I done." He swayed there a moment, frowning. "As a Catholic priest, I must accept men's frailty. And as a European I am too old and tired to expend emotion upon matters I can do nothing about.
Peter Matthiessen
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