I do not know who sings my songs / Before they are sung by me.

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.

All mountain streets have streams to thread them, or deep grooves where a stream might run. You would do well to avoid that range uncomforted by singing floods. You will find it forsaken of most things but beauty and madness and death and God.

For all the toll the desert takes of a man it gives compensations, deep breaths, deep sleep, and the communion of the stars.

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

I suppose no man becomes a pocket hunter by first intention.

Life set itself to new processions of seed-time and harvest, the skin newly turned to seasonal variations, the very blood humming to new altitudes.