Knight’s disdain for Thoreau was bottomless – ‘he had no deep insight into nature’…
The only book Knight didn’t steal was the one he most often saw. ‘I had no need for a Bible,’ he said.
I’m not used to seeing people’s faces. There’s too much information there. Aren’t you aware of it? Too much, too fast.
He left because the world is not made to accommodate people like him.
Passion must be subject to reason; emotions lead one astray. “There was no one to complain to in the woods, so I did not complain.
Knight seemed to weigh the precision of every word he used, careful as a poet. Even his handwritten letters had gone through at least one draft, he said, mostly to remove unnecessary insults. Only necessary ones remained.
Silence, it appears, is not the opposite of sound. It is another world altogether, literally offering a deeper level of thought, a journey to the bedrock of the self.
That silence intimidates puzzles me. Silence is to me normal, comfortable.” Later he added, “I will admit to feeling a little contempt for those who can’t keep quiet.
Still, the ten days were enough for me to see, as if peering over the edge of a well, that silence could be mystical, and that if you dared, diving fully into your inner depths might be both profound and disturbing.
There was no one to complain to in the woods, so I did not complain,’ Knight said.
Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk, wrote that nothing can be expressed about solitude “that has not already been said better by the wind in the pine trees.
The American essayist William Deresiewicz wrote that “no real excellence, personal or social, artistic, philosophical, scientific, or moral, can arise without solitude.
He’d drop his clothes and slip into the water. The lake’s top few inches, after cooking all day in the sun, would be nearly bath warm. “I’d stretch out in the water, ” he said, “and lie flat on my back, and look at the stars.
He never bothered listening to sports; the bored him, every one of them.