The knowledge that refuge is available, when and if needed, makes the silent inferno of the desert more easily bearable. Mountains complement desert as desert complements city, as wilderness complements and completes civilization.

We live in the kind of world where courage is the most essential of virtues; without courage, the other virtues are useless.

Henry James was our master of periphrasis -- the fine art of saying as little as possible in the greatest number of words.

How strange and wonderful is our home, our earth, with its swirling vaporous atmosphere, its flowing and frozen liquids, its trembling plants, its creeping, crawling, climbing creatures, the croaking things with wings that hang on rocks and soar through the fog, the furry grass, the scaly seas.

I, too, believe in fidelity. But how can I be true to one woman without being false to all the others?

Men come and go, cities rise and fall, whole civilizations appear and disappear-the earth remains, slightly modified. The earth remains, and the heartbreaking beauty where there are no hearts to break....I sometimes choose to think, no doubt perversely, that man is a dream, thought an illusion, and only rock is real. Rock and sun.

I come more and more to the conclusion that wilderness, in America or anywhere else, is the only thing left that is worth saving.