[T]hat old September feeling, left over from school days, of summer passing, vacation nearly done, obligations gathering, books and football in the air ... Another fall, another turned page: there was something of jubilee in that annual autumnal beginning, as if last year's mistakes had been wiped clean by summer.

No place is a place until things that have happened in it are remembered in history, ballads, yarns, legends, or monuments. Fictions serve as well as facts.

Death is a convention, a certification to the end of pain, something for the vital statistics book, not binding upon anyone but the keepers of graveyard records.

No life goes past so swiftly as an eventless one, no clock spins like a clock whose days are all alike.

it is an easy mistake to think that non-talkers are non-feelers.

In a way, it is beautiful to be young and hard up. With the right wife, and I had her, deprivation became a game.

That is all the National Parks are about. Use, but do no harm.