Children from a big family have the benefit of a certain amount of neglect.
Youth hasn't got anything to do with chronological age. It's times of hope and happiness.
There is something about all beards that is like the gesture of thumbing the nose. Thank you very much. Up yours.
People, he had said, were always being looked at as points, and they ought to be looked at as lines. There weren't any points, it was false to assume that a person ever was anything. He was always bec...
One thing I have learned hard, if indeed I have learned it now: it is a reduction of our humanity to hide from pain, our own or others'. To hide from anything. That was Marian's text. Be open, be avai...
I’m not writing a book of Western history,' I tell him. 'I’ve written enough history books to know this isn’t one. I’m writing about something else. A marriage, I guess. Deadwood was just a blank spac...
It is hard doctrine, but I was beginning to understand it then, and I have not repudiated it till now: that love, not sin, costs us Eden. Love is a carrier of death - the only thing, in fact, that mak...
Hope was always out ahead of fact, possibility obscured the outlines of reality.
And so, by circuitous and unpredictable routes, we converge toward midcontinent and meet in Madison, and are at once drawn together, braided and plaited into a friendship. It is a relationship that ha...
When you marry into a Mormon family you marry tribes and nations.
There are several dubious assumptions about the early West. One is that it was the home of intractable self-reliance amounting to anarchy, whereas in fact large parts of it were owned by Eastern and f...
It reminds me too much of how little life changes: how, without dramatic events or high resolves, without tragedy, without even pathos, a reasonably endowed, reasonable well-intentioned man can walk t...
In this room hung with the trophies of culture, her story sounded melodramatic and rough. She felt like a squaw explaining how you tanned a deerskin by working brains into the bloody hide and then che...
If there is such a thing as being conditioned by climate and geography, and I think there is, it is the West that has conditioned me. It has the forms and lights and colors that I respond to in nature...
I shall be richer all my life for this sorrow
How do I know what I think till I see what I say?
Faith can reclaim deserts as well as move mountains.
And though creative writing as an intellectual exercise may be pursued with profit by anyone, writing as a profession is not a job for amateurs, dilettantes, part-time thinkers, 25-watt feelers, the l...
And so this is the long road the nation traveled to get to Earthday, 1970, and beyond. Those who lead us down it… did not leave us a bad legacy considering the mood in which the continent was settled,...
After all, what are any of us after but the conviction of belonging?