Top 80 Peter Matthiessen Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “When I’m in the field, when I’m working, I keep very careful notes. I wear big shirts with big breast pockets, and I carry in them two little spiral notebooks.”

— Peter Matthiessen

52. “Course truth don’t count for much after all these years cause folks hangs on to what it suits ’em to believe and won’t let go of it.”

— Peter Matthiessen

53. “The concept of conservation is a far truer sign of civilization than that spoilation of a continent which we once confused with progress.”

— Peter Matthiessen

54. “I used to distinguish between my fiction and nonfiction in terms of superiority or inferiority.”

— Peter Matthiessen

55. “Watson loved them sour kind of jokes, which I enjoyed myself. I mean, ain’t life some kind of a sour joke? Might’s well laugh, that’s the way him and me seen it, whether nice folks seen the joke or not. One time when Watson caught me grinning along with him, he give a wink and lifted up his hat.”

— Peter Matthiessen

56. “There are no roads west of Pohkara, which is the last outpost of the modern world; in one days walk we are a century away.”

— Peter Matthiessen

57. “You truly see by not trying to see.”

— Peter Matthiessen

58. “After four hundred years of betrayals and excuses, Indians recognize the new fashion in racism, which is to pretend that the real Indians are all gone.”

— Peter Matthiessen

59. “The slow stone metamorphoses filled him with longing – longing for what? Simplicity? Was simplicity the true nature of homegoing? The simple harmonies, earth order and abundance. In this churchyard in a woodland meadow at the end of a white road, he missed what he had never known, the peace of living one day then another in communion with others of one’s blood and at the end, at the close of one’s works and days, to draw that last breath and come to rest in earth where one’s bones belonged.”

— Peter Matthiessen

60. “Just goes to show how life leaks away when you ain’t paying attention. One day you look up, look around, and the world is empty. Not empty exactly but something is wrong, there ain’t no color left to life.” outraged, he glared at Lucius. “Watsons long gone and Coxes moved away, Burdetts and Betheas, too. Ain’t none of them good old families left. Died out or gone off to the cities, gone away like they was never here at all.”

— Peter Matthiessen

61. “I was overtaken by a dread of utter solitude in the great turning world.”

— Peter Matthiessen

62. “I think I must be disappointed, having come so far, and yet I do not feel that way. I am disappointed, and also, I am not disappointed. That the snow leopard is, that it is here, that its frosty eyes watch us from the mountain – that is enough.”

— Peter Matthiessen

63. “Monotheism by whatever name has been the rationale for war and genocide forever. And the Unchosen, the inferior Others, are always demonized as an excuse to oppress them.”

— Peter Matthiessen

64. “In the gaunt, brown face in the mirror – unseen since late September – the blue eyes in a monkish skull seem eerily clear, but this is the face of a man I do not know.”

— Peter Matthiessen

65. “Man wants the truth about Ed Watson,” Daniels jeered. “Where you aim to find it? Smallwoods’ll tell you their truth, Hardens’ll tell you theirs. Fat-ass guard out there, he’ll tell you his and I’ll give you another. Which one you aim to settle for and make your peace with?”

— Peter Matthiessen

66. “Webster growled a Webster kind of prayer: “God Almighty, here is two more meek that has inherited Your earth.” Webster spoke in his own peculiar way; we never did learn how to hear him.”

— Peter Matthiessen

67. “I was just very interested in the American frontier and the growth of capitalism – those enormous fortunes that were being made, more often than not, on the blood of poor people, black people, Indian people. They were the ones who paid very dearly for those great fortunes.”

— Peter Matthiessen

68. “Small bits of life crawled and flew about the ward on ancient business.”

— Peter Matthiessen

69. “Nonfiction at its best is like fashioning a cabinet. It can never be a sculpture. It can be elegant and very beautiful, but it can never be sculpture. Captive to facts – or predetermined form – it cannot fly.”

— Peter Matthiessen

70. “This stone on which the lizard lies was under the sea when lizards first came into being, and now the flood is wearing it away, to return it once again into the oceans.”

— Peter Matthiessen

71. “His sunrise mood evaporated with the dew, giving way to restlessness, disquiet. All his life, Lucius’s moods had been prey to shifts of light, and now a leaden melancholy dragged at his spirits.”

— Peter Matthiessen

72. “Well, he was scarcely a parfit gentil knight; as Wolfie said, he looked like some Hollywood Geronimo trying to kick a ninety-dollar habit.”

— Peter Matthiessen

73. “Trouble was, they never let on to their sons how scared they was – so scared they forgot the color of a man because he could outshoot the man who scared ’em. And bein ashamed, they never talked about it or discussed it in the family.”

— Peter Matthiessen

74. “You sucked it up in your mother’s milk, that hate.”

— Peter Matthiessen

75. “Home was that lone house on its great bend of Chatham River, no destination anymore but only the source of a vague sadness he thought of as “homegoing,” a returning to the lost paradise of true belonging.”

— Peter Matthiessen

76. “The sun, coming hard around the world: the island rises from the sea, sinks, rises, holds.”

— Peter Matthiessen

77. “It was a gringo; in the remote corners of the world the short-sleeved flowered tourist shirt, the steel-rimmed glasses, khaki pants and bulldog shoes had become the uniform of earnest American enterprise. Moon recognized the man as the new missionary. His head was cropped too close, so that his white skull gleamed, and the red skin of his neck and jaw was riddled with old acne; his face was bald with anxiety and tiresome small agonies.”

— Peter Matthiessen

78. “Only an idiot would have assumed, he mourned, that despite his years of folly and neglect, his first love would wait in limbo while he solved his life so that they could travel on together into a golden future, never having aged.”

— Peter Matthiessen

79. “There is a difference between right and wrong, always was and always will be, but each man’s wrong and each man’s right are different.”

— Peter Matthiessen

80. “All animals and wayfarers are Tukten’s friends, and listen to him carefully, yet he rarely speaks except when spoken to, and never seems to speak too much; without obtruding, he becomes the centre of each situation, so naturally does he belong where the moment finds him.”

— Peter Matthiessen

81. “Huntin too hard for the truth ain’t a good idea, y’know,” he added. “By the time you stumble over it, it ain’t the truth no more. Unless there’s death in it. I reckon death is about as close to truth as a man can come.”

— Peter Matthiessen

82. “Mistaking Lucius’s silence for acquiescence, he pointed a hard finger at his eyes. “Maybe nobody don’t need this truth you’re lookin for, ever think about that?”

— Peter Matthiessen

83. “Nothing exists but atoms and the void” – so wrote Democritus. And it is “void” that underlies the Eastern teachings – not emptiness or absence, but the Uncreated that preceded all creation, the beginningless potential of all things.”

— Peter Matthiessen

84. “Moment by moment, breath by breath... that is my greatest teaching.”

— Peter Matthiessen

85. “To practice Zen means to realize one’s existence in the beauty and clarity of this present moment, rather than letting life unravel in useless daydreaming of the past and future. To ‘rest in the present’ is a state of magical simplicity.”

— Peter Matthiessen

86. “Dark, blowing clouds of snow over the mountain, and a snowy sunlight in the skeletal hickories – how do you like these common miracles!”

— Peter Matthiessen