Top 55 Quotes & Sayings by Peter Heller

I had to make a living, so I got happily diverted into writing about expeditions and adventures.

I remember the cover of this one L'Amour book showed a guy on horseback, leading a pack horse across a creek in the snow. Something about that cover - all I wanted to do was drift the high lonesome on horseback.

Writing, to me, is like kayaking a river. You are paddling down, and you come to a walled-off canyon, and you make a sharp turn, and you don't know what's around the corner. It could be a waterfall, it could be a big pool. The narrative current carries you. You're surprised, and you're thrilled, and sometimes you're terrified.

I'm fascinated by characters who are faced with big losses and have to put their lives back together again.

Writing nonfiction, you're responsible to posterity, to history, to other people because the events happened, and you feel responsible to record them as they happened.

I write a thousand words a day, and I always stop in the middle of a scene or thought, and it makes it easy to pick up on the next day.

A lot of my nonfiction is very strong environmental stories - I was the first guy to write about the dolphin killings in Japan.

Species are going extinct because of habitat loss and warming. I feel deeply responsible and think about it every day.

I wrote strong advocacy stories, and when I got to fiction, I made a deliberate effort to leave that behind and enter a country where I had no ax to grind, no advocacy issues that I was carrying with me.

Huntington Beach is like ground zero for surfers.

Wanted to write fiction since I was 11, since I first read 'In Our Time' by Hemingway.

Kook means the clueless beginner who paddles his surf board out to the other surfers in the lineup and starts chattering away like it's a cocktail party, completely ignores all the finely-tuned protocols of surf that have developed over decades.

Surfing is a life path. You have to really commit... You have to let go and have faith that it's gonna work out when you take off.

There's always been in my life that tension between living and writing. For me, because I'm so physically exuberant, it was extra hard to sit still at the desk and put in the hours that you need to put in to write.

Writing 'Dog Stars' was coming home. My spirit just sang. It's what I wanted to do my whole life.

The one thing they didn't tell you at Iowa is how hard it is to make a living writing fiction and poetry.

My dad was a copywriter on Madison Avenue at the same time as the TV show 'Mad Men' is set. My mom raised the kids and was a scholarship coordinator at a school. More importantly, dad was a writer and my mom an artist.

My dad's wife, my stepmom, is a serious painter. My dad also paints. My mother is a brilliant sculptor, and her husband is a sculptor.

I like the drinking-out-of-the-fire-hose approach - you're getting way more than you can handle.

I got out of Iowa all set to be a poet and a novelist, but you know what? It's really tough to make a living as a poet.

Loss is universal. I've lost grandparents that I dearly adored, lost animals that were like brothers to me. Many of us have gone through terrible breakups.

I don't know if we will really have a doomsday for human beings, but if we did, to me, it wouldn't be an unjust outcome, given how many species we're taking with us every year.

I just love when the learning curve is steep. And I love being in nature, in the wild.

I write a lot of environmental stories.

I always wanted to be a writer. I was writing poetry when I was 6.

The great thing about fiction is that everything you care about ends up going into the book.

New Zealand is weird. I mean, it does not seem of this earth, not to me. It really is like something made up.

I've always wanted to be a novelist, so I just try to write really great narrative.

I love to fish almost more than anything.

The great thing about being young and dumb is that you don't know what you can't do.

Yes, I love poetry, both to read and to write it. A first love.

I have two younger sisters, and it was a family full of creativity.

When I got out of college, I had to make a living, and I started writing for magazines, and it felt like the perfect job.

With fiction, I felt like I could bring to bear my full imagination, my entire heart, and so you feel very vulnerable. It's not your physical life, but it's everything else, so it felt like a lot was at stake.

All my journalism, all my books are first person, and it's all memoir. Even when I'm writing about the oil spill in the Gulf, it's all first person there.

There is no one to tell this to and yet it seems very important to get this right. The reality and what it is like to escape it. That even now it is sometimes too beautiful to bear.

It is okay for people you love to leave. For them to come and go. She taught it to me over and over.

That is what we are, what we do: nose a net, push push, a net that never exists. The knots in the mesh as strong as our own believing. Our own fears.

Maybe freedom really is nothing left to lose. You had it once in childhood, when it was okay to climb a tree, to paint a crazy picture and wipe out on your bike, to get hurt. The spirit of risk gradually takes its leave. It follows the wild cries of joy and pain down the wind, through the hedgerow, growing ever fainter. What was that sound? A dog barking far off? That was our life calling to us, the one that was vigorous and undefended and curious.

Life and death lived inside each other. That's what occured to me. Death was inside all of us, waiting for warmer nights, a compromised system, a beetle, as in the now dying black timber on the mountains.

If there is nothing else there is this: to be inundated, consumed.

Dont pretend to be that small, you are not that great!

She's a surprise this old earth, one big surprise after another since before she separated from the moon who circles and circles like the mate of a shot goose.

How you refill. Lying there. Something like happiness, just like water, pure and clear pouring in. So good you don’t even welcome it, it runs through you in a bright stream, as if it has been there all along.

Maybe the most real thing the end. To realize when it's too late.

To multiply the years and divide by the desire to live is a kind of false accounting.

Meager as it is. Nothing to lose as I have. Nothing is something somehow.

I think now that maybe true sweetness can only happen in limbo.

Funny how you can live a whole life waiting and not know it.

Is it possible to love so desperately that life is unbearable? I don't mean unrequited, I mean being in the love. In the midst of it and desperate. Because knowing it will end, because everything does. End.

I want to be two people at once. One runs away.

You rest now. Rest for longer than you are used to resting. Make a stillness around you, a field of peace. Your best work, the best time of your life will grow out of this peace.

Grief is an element. It has its own cycle like the carbon cycle, the nitrogen. It never diminishes not ever. It passes in and out of everything.

I think now that maybe true sweetness can only happen in limbo. I don't know why. Is it because we are so unsure, so tentative and waiting? Like it needs that much room, that much space to expand. The not knowing anything really, the hoping, the aching transience: This is not real, not really, and so we let it alone, let it unfold lightly. Those times that can fly.

Most of us are never seen, not clearly, and when we are we likely jump and run.