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“BOUNDARY WATERS is our twentieth-century WALDEN. Like Thoreau, Gruchow
travels into the wilderness as a way to understand himself and the world. Like Thoreau,
he writes in a style as clear, as ordinary and as filled with brilliance as the night sky.”
Mary Pipher
“We ourselves seldom comprehend the moment at hand. So we turn to history, the one
element of our lives it is possible to fix on. Or we turn to principle. Or we turn to nature.
There we find, amid the silence and mystery, order and structure, the sense that life is
not simply random.”
Paul Gruchow
THE NECESSITY OF EMPTY PLACES
“The sacrifice of fame is intimacy. The more widely known one becomes, the less one is a
person and the more an object…One becomes a stranger to the world, lonely and sad.”
Paul Gruchow
THE NECESSITY OF EMPTY PLACES
“I have sometimes said, watching anxiously over my own children, that every human infant
who makes it to maturity is a miracle.”
Paul Gruchow
WORLDS WITHIN A WORLD
“Down the lake a solitary loon cries. The sound is low and mournful. It is sometimes mistaken
for the howl of a wolf. I think that the cry might have come from my own heart. When it echoes
back across the water, it also echoes inside me, and the reverberations do not die away.”
Paul Gruchow
BOUNDARY WATERS
“The wholesome mystery of bread, the sacrament of it…was never in the ingredients, but in the labor,
and in the laborers, who transformed them into bread.”
Paul Gruchow
GRASS ROOTS: THE UNIVERSE OF HOME