p. 14 And the little prince broke into a lovely peal of laughter, which irritated me very much. I like my misfortunes to be taken seriously.
p. 67 "One only understands the things that one tames," said the fox. "Men have no more time to understand anything. They buy things all ready made at the shops. But there is no shop anywhere where one can buy friendship, and so men have no friends any more."
p. 71 "It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important."
p. 230 Reading Nyswander today is still inspiring. Her fierce optimism and respect for the dignity of her patients shine off the page – including recognition of the diversity of psychological and social factors that influence drug use. Casting aside psychoanalytic stereotypes that would reduce all addicts to "masochists" or people seeking a "crude substitute for masturbation," she instead speaks evocatively about the depth and variety of her patients' motivation for using drugs, describing how drug use can serve perfectly understandable functions: "a way of keeping alive whatever life and joy they can feel," or even "a way into a mystical experience," "a clarity of felling and oneness of perception."
p. 266 A fundamental shift in our thinking would be the best way to help people like Josie – letting go of the ideal of a "drug-free" world and instead prioritizing policies and treatments that accept the fact that drug use and addiction are facts of life, unlikely to leave us anytime soon.
p. 281 It is not that addiction is or is not a brain disease, or a social malady, or a universal response to suffering – it's all of these things and none of them at the same time, because each level has something to add but cannot possibly tell the whole story.... [Mental] disorders, in other words, are not ground truths about reality, like chemical elements on the periodic table. Jellinek's word was a good one: they are more like "species" with a general family resemblance – biological species in nature have fuzzy boundaries, and the members of those species are not all the same. We must still make psychiatric diagnoses in order to do research, advocate for insurance payments, or otherwise translate our diagnostic thinking into the real world, but these labels should not be confused with an enduring, unitary, and discrete essence.
p. 8 Irregular hours encouraged him to imagine that he was master of his own time. Home after midnight from a debate on the wording of a minor municipal bylaw on bottle recycling, he felt he was a pin in the hinge of power.
p. 31 But the idea of the north was taking him. He needed something to brace against.
p. 241 Quoyle was not going back to New York, either. If life was an arc of light that began in darkness, ended in darkness, the first part of his life had happened in ordinary glare. Here [in Newfoundland] it was as though he had found a polarized lens that deepened and intensified all seen through it. Thought of his stupid self in Mockingburg, taking whatever came at him. No wonder love had shot im through the heart and lungs, caused internal bleeding.
p. 244 "If you make it to March, boy, you'll make it to heaven. You get on the plane in Misky Bay, there's so much ice on the wings and the wind from hell you doubt the plane can make it, but it does, and when it glides down and lands (in Florida), when they throws open the door, my son, I want to tell you the smell of hot summer and suntan oil and exhaust fumes make you cry with pleasure. A sweet place they got down there with the oranges."
p. 293 "We got no control over any of the fishery now. We don't make the decisions, just does what we're told where and when we're told. We lives by rules made somewhere else by sons a bitches don't know nothin' about this place." A hard exhalation rather than a sigh. But, Quoyle thought, that's how it was everywhere. Jack was lucky he'd escaped so long.
p. 332 Billy Pretty speaking, a glass in his hand. His face gone blood-red with whiskey and the words tumbling out in ecstatic declamation, tossing in the lop of his own talk. "You all know we are only passing by. We only walk over these stones a few times, our boats float a little while and then they have to sink. The water is a dark flower and a fisherman is a bee in the heart of her."
p. 186 "When you write something, you focus your full attention on it. It's almost impossible to write one thing while thinking about another. The act of putting it on paper keeps your thoughts and intentions aligned."
p. 203 I think of all the evenings we've sat on this porch. Drinking. Laughing. Bullshitting with the neighbors passing by as the streetlamps up and down the block winked on.
p. 314 "I've seen so many versions of you. With me. Without me. Artist. Teacher. Graphic designer. But it's all, in the end, just life. We see it macro, like one big story, but when you're in it, it's all just day-to-day, right? And isn't that what you have to make your peace with?"
p. xi DeVoto was not a cloistered scholar. He got out on the trail, by canoe, by foot, on horseback. He traveled where the captains did, saw what they saw, and argued for the conservation of their world. One of his favorite sites was on the Lolo Trail in Idaho, just over the Continental Divide at Lolo Pass, along today's U.S. Highway 12, in a magnificent grove of giant cedars beside the fast-flowing Lochsa River. There he liked to pitch his tent and think about the captains. There, on an early spring day in 1956, his ashes were scattered. The site today is marked by the state of Idaho as the Bernard DeVoto Grove and is maintained as it was when Lewis and Clark came through.
p. liii ...and nearly all of it was in country foreign to the wilderness experience of Americans and requiring radically different techniques. Not only the Rocky Mountains, their rivers, and the Cascade Mountains were unprecedented and unimaginable; so were the high plains, the high plateaus, the overwhelming waters of the Columbia, the tremendous forest of the Northwest, and the sodden winter climate there. It added up to a strangeness for which nothing in the previous frontier culture was a preparation.
p. 426 THURSDAY JULY 17TH 1806. I arrose this morning and made a drawing of the falls, after which we took breakfast and departed. it being my design to strike Maria's river about the place at which I left it on my return to it's mouth in the beginning of June 1805. I steered my course through the wide and level plains which have somewhat the appearance of an ocean, not a tree nor a shrub to be seen.
p. 11 When nothing else of his little postage stamp of Iowa is left to photograph, John turns his camera on the Hoel Chestnut, his exact coeval.
p. 20 At school in Chicago, he learned many things: 1. Human history was the story of increasingly disoriented hunger.
p. 85 Mountains hem him in on three sides. The only TV reception he can get is the ant races. And still a part of him wants to know if his few and private thoughts might in fact be ratified by someone, somewhere. The confirmation of others: a sickness the entire race will die of.
P. 103 A [tree is a] colossal, rising, reaching, stretching space elevator of a billion independent parts, shuttling the air into the sky and storing the sky deep underground, sorting possibility from out of nothing: the most perfect piece of self-writing code that his eyes could hope to see.
p. 114 The parchment-colored leaves riding out the winter - marcescent, he tells her - shining out against the neighboring bare hardwoods.
p. 120 She's not of the herd. She doesn't always hear them well, and when she does, their words don't always make sense. And yet her frantic fellow mammals do make her smile: miracles on all sides, and still they need compliments to keep them happy.
p. 125 The postdoc turns into an adjunct position. She makes almost nothing, but life requires little. Her budget is blessedly free of those two core expenses, entertainment and status.
p. 171 Through the front glass doors of the truck stop, Olivia sees the dozens of gas pumps, and beyond them, the flat expanse of I-80 in the dawn, the snowcapped fields, the endless hostage swap of travelers east and west.... The sky does amazing things. It bruises a little in the freedom of the west, while to the east it spills open like a pomegranate.
p. 210 Falling asleep, he rereads the same paragraph a dozen times; the words turn into twirling things, like winged seeds spinning in the air.
p. 220 A path cuts under the spires lit by late winter's moon, a path she walks almost nightly, out and back like that old palindrome: La ruta nos aportó otro paso natural.
p. 324 Memorial service, at two hundred feet. Adam recalls something he learned in graduate school: memory is always a collaboration in progress.
p. 358 But people have no idea what time is. They think it's a line, spinning out from three seconds behind them, then vanishing just as fast into the three seconds of fog just ahead. They can't see that time is one spreading ring wrapped around another, outward and outward until the thinnest skin of Now depends for its being on the enormous mass of everything that has already died.
p. 379 The product here [in the Amazon fulfillment center] is not so much books as that goal of ten thousand years of history, the thing the human brain craves above all else and nature will die refusing to give: convenience. Ease is the disease and Nick is its vector. His employers are a virus that will one day live symbiotically inside everyone. Once you've bought a novel in your pajamas, there's no turning back.
p. 383 To be human is to confuse a satisfying story with a meaningful one, and to mistake life for something huge with two legs. No: life is mobilized on a vastly larger scale, and the world is failing precisely because no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people.
p. 392 He'll never get used to [Colorado]. It's way too cheery, cold, and dry - the harshest kind of Oz. He finds it unnatural, all the aspens and sun. Not a tree out here taller than an adolescent hemlock back home [in California].
p. 423 No one sees trees. We see fruit, we see nuts, we see wood, we see shade. We see ornaments or pretty fall foliage. Obstacles blocking the road or wrecking the ski slope. Dark, threatening places that must be cleared. We see branches about to crush our roof. We see a cash crop. But trees - trees are invisible.
p. 443 They sit together in the evening, reading and looking, as the sun glints chartreuse off their chestnut's scalloped leaves. Every baring twig seems to Dorothy like a trial creature, apart from but part of all the others. She sees in the chestnut's branching the several speculative paths of a lived life, all the people she might have been, the ones she could or will yet be, in worlds spreading out just alongside this one.
p. 445 She sits in a chair against the wall in a corner of the meeting area. A board of glowing letters across the concourse reads Boston Boston Chicago Chicago Chicago Dallas Dallas... Human goings. Human doings. Ever faster, ever fuller, ever more mobile, ever more empowered.
p. 465 There's a beech in Ohio Patricia would like to see again. Of all the trees she'll miss like breathing, a simple, smooth-boled beech with nothing special to it except a notch on its trunk four feet up from the ground. Maybe it has thrived. Maybe the sun and rain and air have been good to it. She thinks: Maybe we want to hurt trees so much because they live so much longer than we do.
p. 481 Dams break and memories flood him, like the million keyholes of light coming down through the palms of a horse chestnut.
p. 496 He pushes the joystick on the chair and rolls out of the lab into the mild night. The air is spiced with bay laurel and lemon eucalyptus and pepper trees. The scent retrieves all kinds of things he once knew and reminds him of all those things he never will. He breathes in for a long time. Phenomenal, to be such a small, weak, short-lived being on a planet with billions of years left to run.
p. 22 Our passion is simply the work we've trusted ourselves to do.... The trap is this: only after we do the difficult work does it become our calling. Only after we trust the process does it become our passion. "Do what you love" is for amateurs. "Love what you do" is the mantra for professionals.
p. 33 It's not important that the kids developed their musical skills when they were eleven. It's important that they developed the habit of identity. When they looked in the mirror, they saw themselves as musicians, as artists, as people who had committed to a journey.
p. 64 Generosity is the most direct way to find the practice. Generosity subverts resistance by focusing the work on someone else. Generosity means that we don't have to seek reassurance for the self, but can instead concentrate on serving others. It activates a different part of our brain and gives us a more meaningful way forward. People don't want to be selfish, and giving in to resistance when you're doing generous work feels selfish.
p. 68 Positive people are more likely to enjoy the practice. They're not wasting any time experiencing failure in advance.
