Don Berry Quotes

This tree wishes you no harm. God around it in peace. You are hurting yourself......The traveling was a little easier after that, knowing it was not necessary to destroy each tree that blocked him.

He saw a world he had not seen before; a world made not for mastery but for living. Once seen it was a very simple thing to understand. The wonder was that he had been so blind.

All his life had been based on this hostile kind of strength; a strength that viewed the world as a thing to master, to overcome, to fight. As a problem that might be solved by destroying. It seemed faintly ridiculous to him now; and he found it difficult to remember that a life could be based on such fear. There could, he thought , be no impulse to destruction that was not rooted in some terrible fear, and he was no longer afraid.

A black bird of guilt hovers over the death of a man, waiting to perch where it may find room in the minds that remain. It is an easy thing to be deceived by the happenings of the world into believing you are responsible for them. It is part of man's great conceit that he can believe himself responsible for the universe and its actions. It is a part of his conceit that he can believe himself guilty of the death of every other man, and take the guilt of the world on himself.

But there is no guilt to be taken. it is not necessary that the responsibility be assigned. It is not the concern of those who remain, but a thing between the world and the one who is dead. that which was, is not. It is a simple thing.

Bayesian statistics is difficult in the sense that thinking is difficult.

The whites do not believe in such things," Charley said.
"Believe?" Tupshin was bewildered. "What is this talk of belief? Do they not believe in the sea, then? Or the mountains? There is a thing which is, it is not for believing or not believing.

There was no good or bad connected with anything any more.......He regretted nothing; wanted nothing. He was simply existing, and the way things were was the way they had always been and always would be. He didn't care any more. He did what had to be done, and endured in a timeless present, without past or future.

Now it occurred to him the changes of mental state that might be important were just such minor things as this abnormal irritability. Not so dramatic as visions and fevers, maybe. But important. An attitude of carelessness, or annoyance, clouded your judgment, and that was not a good thing in the woods.