Peter Matthiessen Quotes About Eyes

Quotes about: Eyes

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 Not until years later does an instinct come that a vital sense of mystery has been withdrawn.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

  Life, Beauty, Spiritual

  Peter Matthiessen (1998). “Nine-Headed Dragon River: Zen Journals 1969-1982”, p.8, Shambhala Publications

• 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

  Eye, Sadness, Kids

• 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, Long Ago

  Peter Matthiessen (2008). “The Snow Leopard”, p.138, Penguin

• My eye is fixed not on the ending of the book but on the feeling of that ending.

  Peter Matthiessen

  Book, Eye, Feelings

• 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

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin