I wanted to destroy everything beautiful I'd never have.

We destroy everything good just so it will not shame us. How easy it is to both leave & love this place.

We'll start to forget a place once we left it

In a place of all this beauty and potential...we just repeat the same mistakes. Do we hate paradise so much we have to be sure it becomes a trash heap?

The space we stood around had been emptied into us to keep

Unfortunately the hostility that the European displayed toward the native cultures he encountered he carried even further into his relations with the land. The immense open spaces of the American continents, with all their unexploited or thinly utilized resources, were treated as a challenge to unrelenting war, destruction, and conquest. The forests were there to be cut down, the prairie to be plowed up, the marshes to be filled, the wildlife to be killed for empty sport, even if not utilized for food or clothing.

In the act of 'conquering nature' our ancestors too often treated the earth as contemptuously and as brutally as they treated its original inhabitants, wiping out great animal species like the bison and the passenger pigeon, mining the soils instead of annually replenishing them, and even, in the present day, invading the last wilderness areas, precious just because they are still wildernesses, homes for wildlife and solitary human souls. Instead we are surrendering them to six-lane highways, gas stations, amusement parks, and the lumber interests, as in the redwood groves, or Yosemite, and Lake Tahoe-though these primeval areas, once desecrated, can never be fully restored or replaced.

I have no wish to overstress the negative side of this great exploration. If I seem to do so here it is because both the older romantic exponents of a new life lived in accordance with Nature, or the later exponents of a new life framed in conformity to the Machine, overlooked the appalling losses and wastages, under the delusion either that the primeval abundance was inexhaustible or else that the losses did not matter, since modern man through science and invention would soon fabricate an artificial world infinitely more wonderful than that nature had provided-an even grosser delusion. Both views have long been rife in the United States where the two phases of the New World dream came together; and they are still prevalent.

At the time, my life just seemed too complete, and maybe we have to break everything to make something better out of ourselves.

I saw that they wanted to kill the past. When we are old, we let it die; when we are young and strong, we kill it.

I used to have a sign pinned up on my wall that read: Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found in us...It was all about letting go of everything.

We’ve been filled with great treasure for one purpose: to be spilled.

In the process of creating what we want, in pursuit of our happiness, we are just destroying the very source of our life, this planet; we are making a bonfire out of it. But still we are not satisfied, nor are we any more joyful than what people were five hundred years ago.

We destroy to create. But we deny the value of everything we destroy, which serves to make its destruction easier on our consciences. All that we reshape to suit us is diminished, its original beauty for ever lost. We have no value system that does not beggar the world, that does not slaughter the beasts we share it with — as if we are the gods.

If you have to go away,' she said,'is it absolutely necessary to kill off everything you leave behind? I mean do you have to take away everything? ...

The wanting infected the earth.
We lost track of the purpose and reason for life.
We began to forget our songs. We forgot our stories.
We could no longer see or hear our ancestors,
Or talk with each other across the kitchen table.