Nothing the desert produces expresses it better than the unhappy growth of the tree yuccas

This is the sense of the desert hills, that there is room enough and time enough

I am not sure that God always knows who are his great men; he is so very careless of what happens to them while they live.

Man is a great blunderer going about in the woods, and there is no other except the bear makes so much noise. ... The cunningest hunger is hunted in turn, and what he leaves of his kill is meat for some other. That is the economy of nature, but with it all there is not sufficient account taken of the works of man. There is no scavenger that eats tin cans, and no wild thing leaves a like disfigurement on the forest floor.

In the common esteem, not only are the only good aboriginals dead ones, but all aboriginals are either sacred or contemptible according to the length of time they have been dead.

It is no use trying to improve on children's names for wildflowers.

What women have to stand on squarely [is] not their ability to see the world in the way men see it, but the importance and validity of their seeing it in some other way.