My own journey started long before I left, and was over before I returned.

Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down.

This monster of a land, this mightiest of nations, this spawn of the future, turns out to be the macrocosm of microcosm me.

And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed.

No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself.

It seems to me Montana is a great splash of grandeur. The scale is huge but not overpowering. The land is rich with grass and color, and the mountains are the kind I would create if mountains were ever put on my agenda.

A few miles south of Soledad, the Salinas River drops in close to the hillside bank and runs deep and green. The water is warm too, for it has slipped twinkling over the yellow sands in the sunlight before reaching the narrow pool.