wherever you find the greatest good, you will find the greatest evil, because evil loves paradise as much as good.
Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not towisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.
The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.
Hope was always out ahead of fact, possibility obscured the outlines of reality.
It’s easier to die than to move … at least for the Other Side you don’t need trunks.
Creation is a knack which is empowered by practice, and like almost any skill, it is lost if you don’t practice it.
By his very profession, a serious fiction writer is a vendor of the sensuous particulars of life, a perceiver and handler of things. His most valuable tools are his sense and his memory; what happens in his mind is primarily pictures.
That night she wrote a hasty sketch and showed it to Oliver. “It’s all right,” he said. “But I’d take out that stuff about Olympian mountains and the Stygian caverns of the mine. That’s about used up, I should think.
No life goes past so swiftly as an eventless one, no clock spins like a clock whose days are all alike.
To have so little, and it of so little value, was to be quaintly free.
There is some history that I want not to have happened. I resist the consequences of being Nemesis.
Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed … We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in.
[I]t is dangerous for a bride to be apologetic about her husband.
You can’t retire to weakness — you’ve got to learn to control strength.
Salt is added to dried rose petals with the perfume and spices, when we store them away in covered jars, the summers of our past.
In general the assumption of all of us, child or adult, was that this was a new country and that a new country had no history. History was something that applied to other places.
I may not know who I am, but I know where I am from.
After a day and a half or so the traveler will realize that crossing the continent by Interstate he gets to know the country about as well as a cable messenger knows the sea bottom.
Towns are like people. Old ones often have character, the new ones are interchangeable.
Home is a notion that only nations of the homeless fully appreciate and only the uprooted comprehend.
Sally has a smile I would accept as my last view on earth…
Survival, it is called. Often it is accidental, sometimes it is engineered by creatures or forces that we have no conception of, always it is temporary.
Recollection, I have found, is usually about half invention…
It was as if she had thought him into existence again, as if her mind were a flask into which had been poured a measure of longing, a measure of discontent, a measure of fatigue, a dash of bitterness, and pouf, there he stood.
Under the rough and ridiculous circumstances of life in the Rocky Mountains there was something exciting and vital, full of rude poetry: the heartbeat of the West as it fought its way upward toward civilization.
The perfect weather of Indian Summer lengthened and lingered, warm sunny days were followed by brisk nights with Halloween a presentiment in the air.