Neil King Jr. > Quotes

“We are made happy when reason can discover no occasion for it.”
― Neil King Jr., American Ramble: A Walk of Memory and Renewal

“As the year began, I wrote a tally of my good fortunes, a practice I highly recommend. If you start small and build out, it can clarify the magnitude of your blessings. You start with elemental things, like: A heart that beats. Eyes that see. Blood that flows. Lungs that breathe unimpeded by gunk. A mental windshield not too splattered with bugs. Failing to note the absences will cut any proper list of good fortunes in half. The bones that aren’t broken, the illnesses or hates you don’t have, the aches you don’t feel. Like many things that are unswervingly good—oxygen, say, and water—health is likewise transparent and easy to miss when you have it. Then you get to the meaty stuff. A wife you love. A house that isn’t falling down.”
― Neil King Jr., American Ramble: A Walk of Memory and Renewal

“I returned to the main highway a different person in the same shoes.”
― Neil King Jr., American Ramble: A Walk of Memory and Renewal

“Heraclitus with his river you could never step in twice.”
― Neil King Jr., American Ramble: A Walk of Memory and Renewal

“A sedentary life is the real sin against the Holy Spirit,” he wrote in Twilight of the Idols. “Only those thoughts that come by walking have any value.”
― Neil King Jr., American Ramble: A Walk of Memory and Renewal

“To pour forth benefits for the common good is divine.”
― Neil King Jr., American Ramble: A Walk of Memory and Renewal

“My aim now was to be as footloose at sixty-one as many of us are at twenty, but minus the angst of figuring out who I was to become.”
― Neil King Jr., American Ramble: A Walk of Memory and Renewal

“A mental windshield not too splattered with bugs.”
― Neil King Jr., American Ramble: A Walk of Memory and Renewal

“The eye is the lamp of the body,” says Matthew’s Gospel. “If your eye is clear, your whole body will be full of light.”
― Neil King Jr., American Ramble: A Walk of Memory and Renewal

“Do not let the world form you. Do not conform to it. Instead, transform yourself through a renewing of your mind.”
― Neil King Jr., American Ramble: A Walk of Memory and Renewal

“Decorate construction but never construct decoration”
― Neil King Jr., American Ramble: A Walk of Memory and Renewal

“Be not conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”
― Neil King Jr., American Ramble: A Walk of Memory and Renewal

“Sorrow, I learned, is the shadow of love, because what is sorrow but the fear and pain of losing what you love?”
― Neil King Jr., American Ramble: A Walk of Memory and Renewal

“Our time may be short, but we do have great powers to compress and elongate the minutes we have. My friends had brought news of a great leafing underway in Washington, eighty miles to the south.”
― Neil King Jr., American Ramble: A Walk of Memory and Renewal

“We are here to be good and to do no harm and to provide light and warmth to others like the sun and not just leech it like a moon, we resolved. But beyond all that we are here to bear witness in the most fundamental way. To marvel and behold. To take it in. To be present in a way that tilts toward rapture.”
― Neil King Jr., American Ramble: A Walk of Memory and Renewal

“We say that one thing leads to another—and then another, and another after that, and like drops in a river we end up where we are heading along routes not entirely of our choosing.”
― Neil King Jr., American Ramble: A Walk of Memory and Renewal

“two are closely interconnected. That the more fully we understand the brevity of our time, the greater is our aperture for understanding the enormous grandeur of it. Smallness, I once heard Pope Francis say from his balcony high above St. Peter’s Square, is the true path to salvation.”
― Neil King Jr., American Ramble: A Walk of Memory and Renewal

“John Muir picked up Thoreau’s whimsy and told a fellow walker that he hated the word “hike.” Too deliberate. Too Point A to Point B. “People ought to saunter in the woods—not hike!”
― Neil King Jr., American Ramble: A Walk of Memory and Renewal

“That my transience did not diminish my presence but in some odd way deepened it.”
― Neil King Jr., American Ramble: A Walk of Memory and Renewal

“the nature of time and of gravity and whether time essentially ceases in a space free of gravity. If nothing pulls, if nothing moves or degrades or changes shape or form, of course there is no time. Just an everlasting stillness. We talked, too, about whether one’s joy in being alive can be made more potent the more we grasp the smallness of our time on Earth and the insignificance of our status as individuals. We”
― Neil King Jr., American Ramble: A Walk of Memory and Renewal

“Love moves, he wrote, at three miles an hour.”
― Neil King Jr., American Ramble: A Walk of Memory and Renewal

“In America generally,” he wrote in the same essay, “the traveler who would behold the finest landscapes, must seek them not by the railroad, nor by the steamboat, nor by the stagecoach, nor in his private carriage, nor yet even on horseback—but on foot. He must walk, he must leap ravines, he must risk his neck among precipices, or he must leave unseen the truest, the richest, and most unspeakable glories of the land.”
― Neil King Jr., American Ramble: A Walk of Memory and Renewal