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Peter Matthiessen Biography

Peter Matthiessen

Peter Matthiessen (May 22, 1927 – April 5, 2014) was an American novelist, naturalist, wilderness writer, zen teacher and CIA agent. A co-founder of the literary magazine The Paris Review, he was the only writer to have won the National Book Award in both fiction and nonfiction. He was also a prominent environmental activist. Matthiessen's nonfiction featured nature and travel, notably The Snow Leopard (1978) and American Indian issues and history, such as a detailed and controversial study of the Leonard Peltier case, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse (1983). His fiction was adapted for film: the early story "Travelin' Man" was made into The Young One (1960) by Luis Buñuel and the novel At Play in the Fields of the Lord (1965) into the 1991 film of the same name.

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Peter Matthiessen Quotes

Have you seen the snow leopard? No! Isn't that wonderful?

Leopard, Leopards, Seen, Snow, Wonderful

Zen is really just a reminder to stay alive and to be awake. We tend to daydream all the time, speculating about the future and dwelling on the past. Zen practice is about appreciating your life in this moment. If you are truly aware of five minutes a day, then you are doing pretty well. We are beset by both the future and the past, and there is no reality apart from the here and now.

Daydream, Dwelling, Five, Past, Reality

The purpose of meditation practice is not enlightenment; it is to pay attention even at extraordinary times, to be of the present, nothing-but-in-the-present, to bear this mindfulness of now into each event of ordinary life.

Meditation Practice, Enlightenment, Events, Attention, Event, Meditation

I like to hear and smell the countryside, the land that my characters inhabit. I don’t want these characters to step off the page, I want them to step out of the landscape.

Character, Countryside, Land, Page, Smell

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. This 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.

Air, Crannies, Joy, Mind, Same, Water

In zazen, one is one's present self, what one was, and what one will be, all at once.

Present, Self, Zazen

There's an elegiac quality in watching [American wilderness] go, because it's our own myth, the American frontier, that's deteriorating before our eyes. I feel a deep sorrow that my kids will never get to see what I've seen, and their kids will see nothing; there's a deep sadness whenever I look at nature now.

Sadness, Kids, Eye, American, Eyes, See

The Zen expression “Kill the Buddha!” means to kill any concept of the Buddha as something apart from oneself.

Mean, Expression, Oneself, Buddha, Kill, Apart

Alec Wilkinson is a spare, clear, and lucid writer who works in stylistic simplicity with material that is not simple at all.

Clear, Simple, Simplicity, Stylistic, Wilkinson, Writer

You do your best work when you're not conscious of yourself.

Consciousness, Self Conscious, Best Work, Work, Conscious

In fiction, you have a rough idea what's coming up next - sometimes you even make a little outline - but in fact you don't know. Each day is a whole new - and for me, a very invigorating - experience.

Fiction, Ideas, Invigorating, Know, Outline, Writing

In this very breath that we take now lies the secret that all great teachers try to tell us.

Lies, Lying, Secret, Spiritual, Take, Teacher

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

Fiction, Inferiority, Nonfiction, Superiority, Used

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.

Black, Blood, Dearly, Paid, People

I can watch elephants (and elephants alone) for hours at a time, for sooner or later the elephant will do something very strange. . . There is mystery behind that masked gray visage, and ancient life force, delicate and mighty, awesome and enchanted, commanding the silence ordinarily reserved for mountain peaks, great fires, and the sea.

Alone, Animal, Elephant, Inspirational, Life, Motivational

In nonfiction, you have that limitation, that constraint, of telling the truth.

Constraint, Constraints, Fiction And Nonfiction, Limitation, Telling The Truth, Truth

Figures dark beneath their loads pass down the far bank of the river, rendered immortal by the streak of sunset upon their shoulders

Beneath, Dark, Loads, Rivers, Shoulders, Sunset

If we were doomed to live forever, we would scarcely be aware of the beauty around us.

Aware, Beauty, Doomed, Forever, Live Forever

For some time I watch the coming of the night? Above is the glistening galaxy of childhood, now hidden in the Western world by air pollution and the glare of artificial light; for my children's children, the power, peace and healing of the night will be obliterated.

Children, Healing, Night, World, Artificial, Coming

The mystical perception (which is only "mystical" if reality is limited to what can be measured by the intellect and senses) is remarkably consistent in all ages and all places. All phenomena are processes, connections, all is in flux. . . have the mind screens knocked away to see there is no real edge to anything, that in the endless interpenetration of the universe, a molecular flow, a cosmic energy shimmers in all stone and steel as well as flesh.

Intellect, Knocked, Mind, Perception, Real, Universe

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