A child's world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement. It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood.
Beginnings are apt to be shadowy and so it is the beginnings of the great mother life, the sea.
I am always more interested in what I am about to do than in what I have already done.
If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder without any such gift from the fairies, he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement and mystery of the world we live in.
If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children, I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchant-ments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength.
In every out-thrust headland, in every curving beach, in every grain of sand, there is the story of the earth.
The discipline of the writer is to learn to be still and listen to what his subject has to tell him.
Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts.
We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in robert frost's familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road-the one less traveled by-offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of the earth.