There is no way to step off the tread mill. It is all treadmill.
To belong to a clan, to a tight group of people allied by blood and loyalties and the mutual ownership of closeted skeletons. To see the family vices and virtues in a dozen avatars instead of in two o...
Where you find the greatest good, there you will also find greatest Evil, for Evil likes Paradise every bit as much as Good does. What makes the best environment for Clematis armandi makes a lovely ho...
You can’t be close to the mortality of friends without being brought to think of your own.
A teacher enlarges people in all sorts of ways besides just his subject matter.
And I would not blame you if you still asked, Why bother to make contact with kindred spirits you never see and may never hear from, who perhaps do not even exist except in your hopes? Why spend ten y...
As the country at large grows more stressful as a dwelling place, the quiet, remoteness, and solitude of a week on a wild river become more and more precious to more and more people.
I was writing up a New Mexico snow-storm, I had it coming down thick and heavy, muffling the roads and mounding on adobe walls and windowsills and whitening the piñon and junipers when the tapping cam...
If I were a modern writing about a modern young woman I would have to do her wedding night in grisly detail. The custom of the country and the times would demand a description, preferable comic, of fo...
Maybe we were the Diggers of literature.
She was still developing her sundial theory of art, which would count no hours but the sunny ones.
We’re all tougher than we think we are. We’re fixed so that almost anything heals.
You can plan all you want to. You can lie in your morning bed and fill whole notebooks with schemes and intentions. But within a single afternoon, within hours or minutes, everything you plan and ever...
You hear what the dean said about Jesus Christ? ‘Sure He’s a good teacher, but what’s He published?
His clock was set on pioneer time. He met trains that had not yet arrived, he waited on platforms that hadn't yet been built, beside tracks that might never be laid.
I don’t care how they speculate, or what their answers are. We live as we can, we do what we must, and not everything goes by either Freudian or Victorian patterns. What I am sure of is that friendshi...
I tell him I am proud of his genius for construction, but he says he has no genius for anything, he just never knows when he is beaten.
Order is indeed the dream of man, but chaos, which is only another word for dumb, blind, witless chance, is still the law of nature.
Ruth tells me at least once a day that old people, or people getting old, tend to disengage, back away, turn inward, listen only to themselves, and get self-righteous and censorious. And they (I must...
Satisfying natural desires is fine, but natural desires have a way of being both competitive and consequential.
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