Probably most catastrophes end this way without an ending, the dead not even knowing how they died...,those who loved them forever questioning "this unnecessary death," and the rest of us tiring of this inconsolable catastrophe and turning to the next one.

If our father had had his way, nobody who did not know how to fish would be allowed to disgrace a fish by catching him.

Ahead and to the west was our ranger station - and the mountains of Idaho, poems of geology stretching beyond any boundaries and seemingly even beyond the world.

The nearest anyone can come to finding himself at any given age is to find a story that somehow tells him about himself.

I had as yet no notion that life every now and then becomes literature—not for long, of course, but long enough to be what we best remember, and often enough so that what we eventually come to mean by life are those moments when life, instead of going sideways, backwards, forward, or nowhere at all, lines out straight, tense and inevitable, with a complication, climax, and, given some luck, a purgation, as if life had been made and not happened.

Now nearly all those I loved and did not understand when I was young are dead, but I still reach out to them.

It is those we live with and love and should know who elude us.