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.
Nothing is so safe as habit, even when habit is faked.
Maybe we were the Diggers of literature.
It is love and friendship, the sanctity and celebration of our relationships, that not only support a good life, but create one. Through friendships, we spark and inspire one another's ambitions.
It is almost impossible to write fiction about the Mormons, for the reason that Mormon institutions and Mormon society are so peculiar that they call for constant explanation.
I'm tired of hearing that the Lord shapes the back to the burden.
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.
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...
Homesickness is a great teacher. It taught me, during an endless rainy fall, that I came from the arid lands, and like where I came from. I was used to dry clarity and sharpness in the air. I was used...
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.
He used to tell me, 'Do what you like to do. It'll probably turn out to be what you do best.
He has a way of walking through conventions of that kind as if they did not exist, and being so much himself that pretty soon people begin adapting themselves to him.
Grub Street turns out good things almost as often as Parnassus. For if a writer is hard up enough, if he’s far down enough (down where I have been and am rising from, I am really saying), he can’t aff...
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.
Accident, they say, favors the prepared mind. Opportunity knocks only for those who are ready at the door. If we believe the novels we read, upward mobility is always ambitious, hungry, and aggressive...
A writer is an organism that will go on writing even after its heart has been cut out.
A teacher enlarges people in all sorts of ways besides just his subject matter.
Within yourself, you became a grave for her as you were a grave for Chet, and you carried your dead unquietly within you. —
You'll do what you think you want to do, or what you think you ought to do. If you're very lucky, luckier than anybody I know, the two will coincide.
Westerners live outdoors more than people elsewhere because outdoors is mainly what they've got.