Peter Matthiessen quotes

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 Not until years later does an instinct come that a vital sense of mystery has been withdrawn.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

#Spiritual #Pain #Memories

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

#Beautiful #Travel #Regret

In this very breath that we take now lies the secret that all great teachers try to tell us.
-- Peter Matthiessen

#Teacher #Lying #Secret

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

#Character #Smell #Land

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

#Feelings #Landscape #Restless

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

#Sadness #Kids #Eye

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

#Past #Reality #Practice

The purpose of our life is to help others through it.
-- Peter Matthiessen

#Helping Others #Purpose #Helping

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

#Children #Past #Ideas

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

#Memories #Past #Light

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

#Writing #Love Life #Curiosity

Have you seen the snow leopard? No! Isn't that wonderful?
-- Peter Matthiessen

#Snow #Leopards #Wonderful

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

#Real #Perception #Mind

Alec Wilkinson is a spare, clear, and lucid writer who works in stylistic simplicity with material that is not simple at all.
-- Peter Matthiessen

#Simple #Simplicity #Clear

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

#Ideas #Fiction #Each Day

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

#Moving #Eye #Feet

Simultaneously I am myself, the child I was, the old man I will be.
-- Peter Matthiessen

#Children #Men #Old Man

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

#Secret #Mountain #Might

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

#Silly #Eye #Air

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

#Notebook #Two #Littles

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

#Air #Water #Joy

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

#Taken #Years #Rivers

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

#Sunset #Dark #Rivers

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

#Confused #Civilization #Progress

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

#Heart #Knowing #Secret

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

#Practice #Meditation #Enlightenment

Simplicity is the whole secret of well-being.
-- Peter Matthiessen

#Simple #Simplicity #Secret

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

#Skin Color #White #Black

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

#Time #Rocks #Breathing

This world is painted on a wild dark metal
-- Peter Matthiessen

#Dark #World #This World

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

#Moving #Light #Rocks

My eye is fixed not on the ending of the book but on the feeling of that ending.
-- Peter Matthiessen

#Book #Eye #Feelings

If we were doomed to live forever, we would scarcely be aware of the beauty around us.
-- Peter Matthiessen

#Forever #Live Forever

The Zen expression “Kill the Buddha!” means to kill any concept of the Buddha as something apart from oneself.
-- Peter Matthiessen

#Mean #Expression #Oneself

I used to distinguish between my fiction and nonfiction in terms of superiority or inferiority.
-- Peter Matthiessen

#Inferiority #Fiction And Nonfiction #Used

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

#Children #Healing #Night

I think in any writing you're paying attention to detail.
-- Peter Matthiessen

#Writing #Thinking #Details

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

#Blood #People #Black

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

#Cutting #Hair #Listening

You do your best work when you're not conscious of yourself.
-- Peter Matthiessen

#Consciousness #Self Conscious #Best Work

In nonfiction, you have that limitation, that constraint, of telling the truth.
-- Peter Matthiessen

#Nonfiction #Telling The Truth #Constraints