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

At sunrise everything is luminous but not clear.

Poets talk about "spots of time", but it is really the fishermen who experience eternity compressed into a moment. No one can tell what a spot of time is until suddenly the whole world is a fish and the fish is gone.

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 hardest thing usually to leave behind, as was the case now, can loosely be called the conscience.

One of life's quiet excitements is to stand somewhat apart from yourself and watch yourself softly becoming the author of something beautiful even if it is only a floating ash.

At the time I did not know that stories of life are often more like rivers than books.