I should have known I am the rain. I am the land and I am the rain. The grass will grow out of me in a little while.

A boy gets to be a man when a man is needed. Remember this thing. I have known boys forty years old because there was no need for a man.

I remember as a child reading or hearing the words 'The Great Divide' and being stunned by the glorious sound, a proper sound for the granite backbone of a continent. I saw in my mind escarpments rising into the clouds, a kind of natural Great Wall of China.

His ear heard more than what was said to him, and his slow speech had overtones not of thought, but of understanding beyond thought.

Maybe the hardest thing in writing is simply to tell the truth about things as we see them.

Luck or tragedy, some people get runs. Then of course there are those who divide it even, good and bad, but we never hear of them. Such a life doesn't demand attention. Only the people who get the good or bad runs.

The new American finds his challenge and his love in the traffic-choked streets, skies nested in smog, choking with the acids of industry, the screech of rubber and houses leashed in against one another while the town lets wither a time and die.