"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. And this debasement of our vision, the 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."

"There’s a creation, a creating force. But whatever it is is in everything we see. It’s in that log, in that stone. It’s just the power. And I’ve had many experiences with it. Certain circumstances bring it out, which all the mystics know. That is part of our Zen training too. It’s called an "opening." … For a second, you see what the world is. It is a whole other way of seeing, which is horrible, terrifying, and extraordinary and a great blessing to have."

"Peter Matthiessen’s writing — fiction and nonfiction — does not provide approximations. What it does do with inimitable skill is put a reader at the live heart of life — a powerful, rich sense of immediacy, of being in that moment. … He is a man of tough-minded opinion, deeply earned and forthrightly rendered, with passion and quick humor ringed with what one writer calls a "useful melancholy." … There is, to my mind, no writing life more vital and of greater distinction in the second half of our century. Matthiessen’s prodigious and varied works led William Styron to call him "an original and powerful artist . . . who has produced as distinguished a body of work as any writer of our time . . . He has immeasurably enlarged our consciousness.""

""Warbler Woods" (For Peter Matthiessen) Never too proud to tip his head back./To gaze, look beyond.../He knew the names of every warbler,/stitched inside his skin,/the seven eagles, graceful cranes, he followed them/to tucked-away forests and creeks, could see/a slightest flicker of movement,/a nesting memory, how the world was once,/would never be again./He could stand under skies for hours,/never weary of their habits, never tire."

"Toni Morrison, Kay Boyle, Philip Roth, Peter Matthiessen, Anne Tyler, and Rosellen Brown read an unknown manuscript and responded with those quotes and marks of approval that appear on book jackets. These were completely unsolicited and I still find it remarkable that these writers, overwhelmed with pleas and manuscripts, picked up Love Medicine and responded. There were a great number of people kind along the way. One hears much more about the egomania and posturing of writers than one does about the devotion that writers have for one another's work."

"I rarely go back to a book, since I never feel sufficiently caught up in my own work. However, a few years ago, on a stalled expedition, I had an opportunity to reread The Idiot, which I’ve always thought of as “my favorite novel” (if such a thing can be; the great ones are no more comparable than the sun and the sky). I wanted to see if that book held up — if it was as heartbreaking and magnificent as I once thought it, and of course it was. Whereas — well, let’s simply say that most modern novels, even the better ones, are pretty dinky in ambition and certainly unworthy of a second reading when one knows that great ones are still out there unread. … I admire many of my contemporaries, especially those who risk something or bring some new element to their work. … Of course, there are single novels that are excellent, but what interests me most is the working through from book to book of some recurrent obsession or at least preoccupation, a reverberation from within, which may burst the work wide at any moment, though it often seems half-hidden from the writer. What I’m trying to describe, I guess, is conflagration, a life burning up, as lives do in Dostoyevsky. Obsession that isn’t crazed or criminal is always enthralling."

"Change engenders resistance, and resistance creates saboteurs."

"Building your product is easy. The hard part is getting customers."

"Winners understand why customers buy."

"The answers are easy. Asking the right questions is hard."

"The best startups discover a situation where customers have tried to build a solution themselves."

"Only because earlyvangelists are buying into your total vision will they spend money for an incomplete, buggy, barely functions first product."

"No business plan survives its first contact with customers."

"Startups demand comfort with chaos, uncertainty and change."

"Market type influences everything a company does."

"If you're afraid to fail in a startup, you're destined to do so."

"In a startup, founders define the product vision and then use customer discovery to find customers and a market for that vision."

"Relentless execution without knowing what to execute is a crime."

"On Day One, a startup is a faith-based enterprise."

"A startup is a temporary organization in search of a scalable, repeatable, profitable business model."

"A startup is not a smaller version of a large company."

"Don’t execute other peoples advice if you can’t explain why you’re doing it."

"Number one is "Do you have curiosity?" Number two is "Does it translate to imagination?" But number three is "Did it translate to action?" That’s the difference between someone with an idea and someone who is an entrepreneur."

"Progress and stability are mutually exclusive."

"Customer Development says “Glad you have these hypotheses about your startup. All of them are probably wrong.”"

"We used to pivot by firing people. Now we fire the hypotheses."

""Build it and they will come” is not a strategy; it’s a prayer."

"Mentorship is a two-way street. While I was learning from them [brilliant mentors] - and their years of experience and expertise - what I was giving back was equally important. I brought fresh insights and new perspectives to their thinking."

"Libraries, as spaces, need to continue to inspire the public to dream big and to think great thoughts. Cities, towns, and academic communities of all shapes and sizes need the free, open public spaces that libraries–and only libraries–provide."

"When I was young, I learned a quote in Sunday school that has stayed with me throughout my life. It said, 'teach us to number our days that we gain a heart of wisdom.' * Most of us will wake up 28,762 days- and then one day - we won’t. That means you have about 21,000 days left - and about 14,000 of them for your career. So herein lies the urgency."

"Don't believe your own b.s. It's real easy to confuse funding with success."

"Young entrepreneurs tend to be fearless and have no respect for the status quo, and that’s exactly what you need in an environment where the status quo is going to put you out of business."

"To predict the future, 1/3 of your team needs to be crazy."

"There are no facts inside the building, so get the hell outside."

"Strategy Is not a to-do list."

"Entrepreneurs are artists and I mean “artists” in the true sense of the word: they see something no one else does."

"A founder's skill is knowing how to recognize new patterns and to pivot on a dime. At times the pattern is noise, and the vision turns out to be a hallucination."

"In Silicon Valley, we have a special word for a failed entrepreneur – it’s called experienced."

"Founders fit the definition of a composer: they see something no one else does. And to help them create it from nothing, they surround themselves with world-class performers."

"Entrepreneurship is an art, not a job."

"Founders are truly artists – they see something no one else does."

"Innovation comes from those who see things that other don’t."

"80% of success in your career will come from just showing up. The world is run by those who show up…not those who wait to be asked."

"Confusing testosterone with strategy is a bad idea."

"While there is an occasional bad apple, the public market rewards companies with revenue growth and sustainable profits."

"Customers don't ask to see your business plan."

"Librarians need to focus not on individual, physical libraries but on the larger networks–physical and digital–of which their libraries are part."

"To put things in perspective, recall that all the great libraries of antiquity–including the libraries of Alexandria and Pergamum–have disappeared completely. However, the world did not lose the knowledge they contained when they disappeared. Some of what was held in those libraries had been moved to other locations, either to be copied or because it was stolen. Even the fate of the libraries of antiquity shows that preservation relies not on the persistence of specific institutions, but on proper functioning of a system that includes redundancy and the sharing of knowledge across institutions. There is a great deal more progress to be made in this respect during this transition to the digital age, but the importance of doing so is unmistakable."

"The measure of a life is not time or money. It’s the impact you make serving God, your family, community, and country. Your report card is whether you leave the world a better place."

"Change happens only when you could educate and inspire others. When you could use facts to create faith in what's possible... The easy part will be to write papers for your peers... The harder part, and the one you should think about, is how are you going to explain inconvenient truths to people who may not want to hear them. How are you going to rouse an audience to action?"