Henry David Thoreau is very independent-minded, very iconoclastic, and had quite a corrosive sense of humor. I think that I probably have grown up to have a Thoreauvian perspective on many things. Though in other ways I live a life he would not have approved of. He believed to simplify, simplify, simplify. Make your life very clear and plain and meditative and not confused. Sometimes my life, in fact, is confused.
- Joyce Carol Oates
source: "America's Foremost Woman of Letters". American Academy of Achievement Interview, www.achievement.org. June 3, 2006.
topic: Confused, Independent, Thinking, David Thoreau
There are instances: [Henry David] Thoreau read [John] Wordsworth, [John] Muir read Thoreau, Teddy Roosevelt read Muir, and you got national parks. It took a century for this to happen, for artistic values to percolate down to where honoring the relation of people's imagination to the land, or beauty, or to wild things, was issued in legislation.
- Robert Hass
source: "Robert Hass" by Sarah Pollock, www.motherjones.com. March/April 1997.
topic: Land, Imagination, People, National Parks, Wordsworth
The power of reading a great book is that you start thinking like the author. For those magical moments while you are immersed in the forests of Arden, you are William Shakespeare; while you are shipwrecked on Treasure Island, you are Robert Louis Stevenson; while you are communing with nature at Walden, you are Henry David Thoreau. You start to think like they think, feel like they feel, and use imagination as they would. Their references become your own, and you carry these with you long after you've turned the last page.
- Tony Robbins
topic: Book, Reading, Thinking, David Thoreau, Treasure Island