I didn’t know myself well, and still don’t. But I did know, and know now, the few people I loved and trusted. My feeling for them is one part of me I have never quarreled with, even though my relation...
How to write a story, though ignorant or baffled. You take something that is important to you, something you have brooded about. You try to see it as clearly as you can, and to fix it in a transferabl...
How do you make a book that anyone will read out of lives as quiet as these? Where are the things that novelists seize upon and readers expect? Where is the high life, the conspicuous waste, the viole...
Hope was always out ahead of fact, possibility obscured the outlines of reality.
Closing up the canyon camp was like closing up a house after a death. (It is easier to die than to move, she wrote Augusta once; at least for the Other Side you don’t need trunks.)
After all, what are any of us after but the conviction of belonging?
Youth hasn't got anything to do with chronological age. It's times of hope and happiness.
What the disorderly crave above everything is order, what the dislocated aspire to is location.
There is something about all beards that is like the gesture of thumbing the nose. Thank you very much. Up yours.
There is nothing like a doorbell to precipitate the potential into the kinetic.
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...
Faith can reclaim deserts as well as move mountains.
Do we all buzz or ring or light up when people press our vanity buttons, and only then? Can I think of anyone in my whole life whom I have liked without his first showing signs of liking me?
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...
A wandering dog of a night wind came in off the sagebrush mesa carrying a bar of band music, and laid it on her doorstep like a bone.
There it was, there it is, the place where during the best time of our lives friendship had its home and happiness its headquarters.
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...
Mexico was an interlude of magic between a chapter of defeats and an unturned page.
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...