Peter Matthiessen Quotes

In Nonfiction, You Have That Limitation, That Constraint, Of Telling The Truth.

I Used To Distinguish Between My Fiction And Nonfiction In Terms Of Superiority Or Inferiority.

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!

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.

Alec Wilkinson Is A Spare, Clear, And Lucid Writer Who Works In Stylistic Simplicity With Material That Is Not Simple At All.

I Think In Any Writing You're Paying Attention To Detail.

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.

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.

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.

The Ancient Intuition That All Matter, All "reality," Is Energy, That All Phenomena, Including Time And Space, Are Mere Crystallizations Of Mind, Is An Idea With Which Few Physicists Have Quarreled Since The Theory Of Relativity First Called Into Question The Separate Identities Of Energy And Matter. Today Most Scientists Would Agree With The Ancient Hindus That Nothing Exists Or Is Destroyed, Things Merely Change Shape Or Form; That Matter Is Insubstantial In Origin, A Temporary Aggregate Of He Pervasive Energy That Animates The Electron.

My Eye Is Fixed Not On The Ending Of The Book But On The Feeling Of That Ending.

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.