I now find the most marvelous things in the everyday, the ordinary, the common, the simple and tangible.

A critic is to an author as a fungus to an oak.

A mother's sorrow is more true, honorable, and beautiful than the detachment of the sage.

Among politicians and businessmen, *Pragmatism* is the current term for 'To hell with our children.'

The great question of life is not the question of death but the question of life. Fear of death shames us all.

The fire. The odor of burning juniper is the sweetest fragrance on the face of the earth, in my honest judgment; I doubt if all the smoking censers of Dante's paradise could equal it. One breath of juniper smoke, like the perfume of sagebrush after rain, evokes in magical catalysis, like certain music, the space and light and clarity and piercing strangeness of the American West. Long may it burn.

Charity should be spontaneous. Calculated altruism is an affront.