The following are quotes from Kim’s books
Wild Nature
“Rivers don’t run straight; neither should roads.”
VISIONS OF A WILD AMERICA | Page 56
“Mountains, like revolutions and freshly baked bread and the best music, rise from the bottom up.”
RHYTHM OF THE WILD | Page 148
“In the city we listen to respond; in the wilderness we listen to understand.” RHYTHM OF THE WILD | Page 249
“The land is made of stories. They color and texture everything.”
RHYTHM OF THE WILD | Page 173
“Nature doesn’t lie. It might not tell you what you want to hear. It might be a brutal truth. But it is the truth.”
JIMMY BLUEFEATHER | Page 10
“The night is moonless when the rain stops and the stars have their way, and we sleep on shore with the sea-tossed shells and the tangled kelp and nothing seems urgent because nothing is. Whales swim into our dreams then. I hear a spouting in the distance, a deep breathing through the fog.”
THE ONLY KAYAK | Page 31
Wild Animals
“Bear or no bear, it’s not the bear itself but the possibility of seeing one that makes us see everything else in greater detail.”
RHYTHM OF THE WILD | Page 145
“What always struck Keb in a photo of a fat man and a fish was the beauty and intelligence of the fish.”
JIMMY BLUEFEATHER | Page 183
“Protect the wild bear and the wilderness where it lives, and ask your children to do the same. Because if we lose the wilderness and the bear, a spirit will die, and a part of us will die with it.”
IN DENALI | Page 24
“I don’t want a wolf to be my trophy or pet. I don’t want him as a friend. I want him to be my patient teacher, my magical, mysterious cousin on the tree of life, his branch not far from mine, nourished by the same sun and sky, made strong by the same wind and rain.”
RHYTHM OF THE WILD | Page 31
Living & Dying
“Forget success. Be a healer, peacekeeper, storyteller. Eat homegrown carrots and potatoes. Sleep in a small cabin; let the mountains be your mansion.”
RHYTHM OF THE WILD | Page 224
“Why is it that death for each of us comes either too early or too late?” JIMMY BLUEFEATHER | Page 177
“The rich might have nicer coffins than the poor, but in the end they’re not aware of it and are no more comfortable.”
JOHN MUIR AND THE ICE THAT STARTED A FIRE | Page 192
“My high school reunions are beginning to look more like archaeological digs than social events.”
THE ONLY KAYAK | Page 144
“And don’t forget this: Head up to the rimrock, into the rainforest, across the desert or through the canyon, wherever the waters sing and rocks listen and ancient trees hold wise counsel. Walk down to the shore, get in a small boat, and push off. Paddle around that point and the one beyond. Camp on the bedrock, the beach, the moss. Sleep under the stars. Listen to the whisper of the tides, the chatter of barnacles, the gossip of geese. Drink the rain. Eat garden carrots. Laugh and sing with a friend. Tell stories. Always stories. Read a book, and another, and another. Converse with sea otters, harbor seals, and sandhill cranes. They will never fail you.”
THE ONLY KAYAK I Pages 223-24
Ownership & Money
“Money, like the sun, offers great warmth and light. It also burns and blinds.”
RHYTHM OF THE WILD | Page xviii
“The environment is the economy.”
RHYTHM OF THE WILD | Page 248
“It isn’t what we own that makes us rich, it’s what we give away.”
JOHN MUIR AND THE ICE THAT STARTED A FIRE | Page 174
“Any student of natural history could see that nature was beautiful and brutal. Witness how the swallow skims the river and catches bugs on the wing, how the cougar takes down the deer, how the eagle snaps the duck. It’s a lethal, bloody affair. But none of these animals creates a machine to magnify their killing. None invent an economy that can never be satiated. None create corporations that at all coasts – the loss of dignity or even human life – must keep growing.”
JOHN MUIR AND THE ICE THAT STARTED A FIRE | Page xiv
Politics & Paradox
“The less the ignorant man knows, the more stubbornly he knows it."
ON HEAVEN’S HILL | Page 288
“A man can get more easily drunk on freedom than he can get sober on restraint.”
ALASKA LIGHT | Page 13
“Make access easy and a place dies… Access becomes excess.”
THE ONLY KAYAK | Page 205
“Security can be anesthetizing. Some people pursue it their entire lives and seem dead on their feet…. Obsessed with comfort, we even pad our coffins.”
THE ONLY KAYAK | Page 207
“So much vitriol and polarity on television. So much rant radio. I had to turn it off. I wanted to be informed, not inflamed.”
THE ONLY KAYAK | Page 216
“Does that which nurtures us in turn deserve our nurturing?”
THE ONLY KAYAK | Page 218
Spirituality, Wonder & Other Matters
“Words are magic, they come in boxes called books.”
ON HEAVEN’S HILL | Page 39
“Who needs stained glass when you have a clearing storm? Who needs flying buttresses when you have sandhill cranes?”
RHYTHM OF THE WILD | Page xii
“Why does religion make good people better and bad people worse?"
ON HEAVEN’S HILL | Page 84
“We are not human beings on a spiritual journey, we are spiritual beings on a human journey, born into our lives for one reason only: to seek the road that makes death a fulfillment.”
JIMMY BLUEFEATHER | Page 38
“It’s not Jesus who disappoints me. It’s his fan club. He’s a charismatic guy with delusional followers.”
ON HEAVEN’S HILL | Page 170
“And what do we gain if we reach Heaven and leave behind a spoiled Earth?”
RHYTHM OF THE WILD | Page 247
“Some men get down on their knees out of faith. Others for flowers. Me? I find salvation in a saxifrage.”
RHYTHM OF THE WILD | Page 24
Finding a Place, Making a Home
“You have to invent new words for the way beauty expresses itself in Alaska.”
ON HEAVEN’S HILL | Page 284
“Wasn’t it enough to hear a wolf howl, to build a morning fire in the kitchen cookstove, to taste the first nagoonberry pie of summer, to carve a spoon from alder? Wasn’t it enough to feel the tide run beneath your boat, a boat you built with hand tools and great heart?
JIMMY BLUEFEATHER | Page 29
“For most people who move to Alaska, history begins the day they step off the plane.”
THE ONLY KAYAK | Page 151
“How deceptive the sea can be, considering all the stories it knows and the ones it chooses to tell.”
THE ONLY KAYAK | Page 155
“I came here for the place, but stayed for the people. I stayed for the friendships, the warmth we find in the cold, the closeness we feel in the distance. I stayed because my friends stayed, and together we formed a community, a blanket, a family held together by stories about love and loss, risk and hope.”
THE ONLY KAYAK | Page XII
Rebellion, Restoration
& Revolution
“If at first you don’t succeed, find another definition of success.”
RHYTHM OF THE WILD | Page xviii
“All great opportunities mask themselves as insurmountable problems.” JOHN MUIR AND THE ICE THAT STARTED A FIRE | Page 193
“In the entire history of the United States of America, whenever a Native was assimilated into white society, he or she always suffered and dreamed of being free again. And whenever a white Christian joined an Indigenous Tribe--Cherokee, Shoshone, Nez Perce, Comanche, whatever--and became one of them, he or she never chose to return to white Christianity." ON HEAVEN’S HILL | Page 143
"The truth is the truth, even if no one believes it. And a lie is a lie, even if everyone believes it."
ON HEAVEN’S HILL | Page 47
“So the questions arises: Who am I – who are any of us – to be in this free society? A lion, or a lamb? A lion, says Edward Abbey. A lamb says the bureaucrat, the artful dodger of controversy, positioning himself for the next promotion, looking good while doing nothing.”
RHYTHM OF THE WILD | Page 126
“Heresy will become orthodoxy, but never without a struggle.”
VISIONS OF A WILD AMERICA | Page 174
Industry & Technology
As for tomorrow, I’m not enthused about our hyper-technological, genetically engineered future, unless I can be programmed to think otherwise.”
RHYTHM OF THE WILD | Page xvii
“And I wonder – I even worry, as a child might worry about monsters under the bed – if one day people will stop reading and only watch movies and sitcoms and football, and shuffle about their seam-sealed homes between the kitchen, bathroom and sofa. Warrior fans in their bathrobes and soft slippers, beer in one hand, channel-changer in the other. Maybe not. Maybe books will live forever.”
RHYTHM OF THE WILD | Page 108
“Engineers can dam reivers but can’t make them meanders. I know an architect, a talented man who can design buildings stronger than oaks, but he could never improve upon a leaf.”
THE ONLY KAYAK | Page 66
"When a Yale-trained forester once proclaimed - as Yale-trained foresters had proclaimed for decades - that the oldest, largest trees should be cut down and processed into wood pulp because their rates of rot had exceeded their rates of growth, making them 'overmature,' Gracie famously asked the forester if he too one day, in his old age, should be measured so crudely. And processed into pulp, rayon, and throwaway cellophane." JIMMY BLUEFEATHER I Page 141
Words & Music
"You never hear a parent say to a child: 'Let me read you some bedtime statistics.' It's not who we are. Statistics are just a tool, a valuable tool, but nothing more. Stories, on the other hand. . . they save us."
ON HEAVEN’S HILL | Page 73
“Forgive my obsession with music, but I have to say that Denali itself is a composition, a symphony or a song as old as the rocks.”
RHYTHM OF THE WILD | Page 248
“Wilderness is to civilization what improvisation is to music.”
RHYTHM OF THE WILD | Page 249
“What then to write? What to say? Do I entertain or inform? Describe things as they are or as they ought to be? Ask the reader to celebrate or agitate? It’s risky business to conjure up words, ideas, rhetoric.”
RHYTHM OF THE WILD | Page 161
“I’ve heard others talk about how nature works; how natural systems function and operate. They say we must work in nature and for nature. For me, though, nature doesn’t work. It plays and sings. Take the rivers with their rock and roll, the storms with their symphonic peaks, the flowers with their gentle refrains. And best of all, the wild animals and birds with their syncopated sevenths and ninths, all jazzed up, suspended, moving in four-five time to the greatest rhythm of all, the mystery around and within us. This is how I dream.”
RHYTHM OF THE WILD | Page 234
War & Other
Bad Habits
“Wars, like affairs, are easier to get into than out of.”
RHYTHM OF THE WILD | Page 180
“The general who wins the battle is the one who makes the fewest mistakes.”
ON HEAVEN’S HILL | Page 46
“The hawk eats the dove.”
RHYTHM OF THE WILD | Page 181
“The first thing an Army medic told Papa as he lay dying on the dusty ground, blown to bits, was this: ‘Stay with me soldier. Don’t close your eyes. Because if you do, you might never reopen them.’”
ON HEAVEN’S HILL | Pages 13-14
“If guns were ostracized, only ostriches would have guns.”
ON HEAVEN’S HILL | Page 47
"Any politician who calls for US involvement in a foreign war must make their announcement from the middle of Arlington National Cemetery, surrounded by an ocean of white crosses."
ON HEAVEN'S HILL | Page 287
Morality
“To err is human, but to ‘arr' is pirate."
ON HEAVEN’S HILL | Page 125
“The more centered you are the less you occupy the center.”
JIMMY BLUEFEATHER | Page 161
“If a thousand beliefs are destroyed in our march to the truth, we must still march on.”
JIMMY BLUEFEATHER | Page 96
“We can’t have it all; we shouldn’t even want it all.”
RHYTHM OF THE WILD | Page 165
“I can learn patience from these rocks, and tenacity from the kelp anchored to them.”
ALASKA LIGHT | Page 25
“We save wild places so they will one day save us. They already have.” RHYTHM OF THE WILD | Page 245
Adventure
“I glide forward, thinking that a kayaker’s passage through Glacier Bay is more like that of light through water, a refraction, a silent process of changing – and being changed – with each pull of the paddle and chant of the rain… ”
THE ONLY KAYAK | Page 4
“I live in the sunlight of friends and the shadows of glaciers.”
THE ONLY KAYAK | Page IX
“Glaciers, mountains, rivers, forests, tundra; a landscape rich with places that have never felt the tread of human feet. It thrills me not because I could break first ground, but because such ground remains unbroken.”
IN DENALI | Page 11
“You don’t need to say Alaska is profound. Just say Alaska.”
ALASKA LIGHT | Page 75
“Alaska’s wildness and inaccessibility are what define it and protect it. Were it easy to reach, and safe and predictable, it wouldn’t be Alaska anymore. It would be AlaskaWorld, a theme park full of fun and nature and guarantees, perfect for tourists, but anathema for travelers. Scenic yes, wild no.”
ALASKA LIGHT | Page 75
Love & Loss
“In the end, I believe our similarities far outweigh our differences, and nothing matters more than compassion and love.”
JIMMY BLUEFEATHER | Page 259
“We like someone because; we love someone although.”
JIMMY BLUEFEATHER I Page 54
“I wondered how to love this world, with its wildness slipping away, and was told to love it in great, good sadness. And how to turn the tide? If not by persuasion then guile, if not guile then force, if not force them poem, prayer and song.”
THE ONLY KAYAK I Page 62
“I found all the questions without answers frightening but not as frightening as all the people not asking them.”
THE ONLY KAYAK I Page 62
"For a moment his own weathered caught his attention - the way his bones fitted to the wood, the wilderness between his fingers, the space where Bessie's hand used to be."
JIMMY BLUEFEATHER | Page 9
Assorted Mutterings
"I prefer questions that can't be answered to answers that can't be questioned."
ON HEAVEN’S HILL | Page 300
“Such is Interior Alaska, a landscape built for wings, a seemingly endless maze of tussocks, ponds, sedge flats, lakes, thickets and bogs and other expressions of wetlands.”
RHYTHM OF THE WILD | Page 133
“We cannot escape numbers, nor should we want to. There’s beauty in a bell curve; perfection in the laws of nature, the universal equation. But stories inhabit the heart, not the head. They remind us of what’s sacred.” RHYTHM OF THE WILD | Page 182
“Take off your shoes. Sing and dance for twenty minutes each day. Unless you’re really busy. Then sing and dance for an hour. Take a deep breath. Listen. Whatever cookie-cutter life you had planned for yourself, forget it. Specialization is for insects. Industry is for machines.”
RHYTHM OF THE WILD | Page 267