""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."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Novelists from the United StatesAcademics from the United StatesTravel writersEnvironmentalists from the United StatesNaturalists from the United States
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Naomi Shihab Nye Voices in the Air: Poems for Listeners (2018)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Peter_Matthiessen
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Peter Matthiessen
Peter Matthiessen (22 May 1927 – 5 April 2014) was an American novelist, naturalist, wilderness writer, zen teacher and CIA agent. A co-founder of the literary magazine The Paris Review, he is the only writer to have won the National Book Award in both fiction and nonfiction.
15 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Peter Matthiessen →
Related Quotes
"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…"
"Amazingly, we take for granted that instinct for survival, fear of death, must separate us from the happiness of pure…"
"The progress of the sciences toward theories of fundamental unity, cosmic symmetry (as in the unified field theory) —…"
"The ancient intuition that all matter, all “reality,” is energy, that all phenomena, including time and space, are me…"
"In another life — this isn’t what I know, but how I feel — these mountains were my home; there is a rising of forgott…"
"Zen has been called the "religion before religion," which is to say that anyone can practice, including those committ…"
"I have often tried to isolate that quality of "Zen" which attracted me so powerfully to its literature and later to t…"
"A Mahayana teaching with a strong Taoist infusion, Ch'an or Zen cast off the dead weight of priestly ritual and mindl…"
"When we are mired in the relative world, never lifting our gaze to the mystery, our life is stunted, incomplete; we a…"
"I am a writer. A fiction writer who also writes nonfiction on behalf of social and environmental causes or journals a…"