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“If happiness required me to ignore my thoughts and questions, then I hoped to never be happy.”
― Daniel J. Rice, The UnPeopled Season: Journal from a North Country Wilderness

“Eli returned to the river and paused for a moment midstream. His feet were balanced upon uneven stones. The current tumbled around him. The canyon walls were steep and jagged and solid. The colors beneath the surface stirred and glittered. He wanted to hold his face under water and breathe in their beauty. He dipped his fingers into the snow-cold transient texture and felt a tingle. He closed his eyes to see this sensation clearly. He breathed. He put his hand up to his face and felt the freshness enter his soul. Water droplets dripped from his skin and returned to the river. He opened his eyes as if they were separate from his body, separate from the tension of life, distant from any distraction. He breathed.”
― Daniel J. Rice, THIS SIDE OF A WILDERNESS: A Novel

“The molting light glowed on the horizon where darkness wriggled itself free and shook off the sun like the nymphal skin of a mayfly. The magenta sky fell down. Golden embers of fire disappeared into darkness. This was a mysterious world and he wanted to paint it. He wanted to capture it the way he saw it now. He crawled into his tent and fell asleep to the thought that we are all painters of a mysterious world, a world of colors only magic could explain, and viewed only through the prismatic distortion of our own eyes.”
― Daniel J. Rice, THIS SIDE OF A WILDERNESS: A Novel

“My attraction to wild places is, in part, an attempt to relive the innocence and imagination lost after youth. To be submersed in the innocence of a forest, the ungoverned landscape, to exist by my own laws and no one else’s, even if only briefly — this is one of the primary beacons that guides me back into wild places.”
― Daniel J. Rice, THE UNPEOPLED SEASON: A Journal of Solitude and Wilderness