In fiction I think we should have no agenda but to tell the truth.

One cannot be pessimistic about the West. This is the native home of hope. When it fully learns that cooperation, not rugged individualism, is the quality that most characterizes and preserves it, then it will have achieved itself and outlived its origins. Then it has a chance to create a society to match its scenery.

Salt is added to dried rose petals with the perfume and spices, when we store them away in covered jars, the summers of our past.

Every green natural place we save saves a fragment of our sanity and gives us a little more hope that we have a future.

It is almost impossible to write fiction about the Mormons, for the reason that Mormon institutions and Mormon society are so peculiar that they call for constant explanation.

We simply need that wild country available to us... For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.

To try to save for everyone, for the hostile and independent as well as the committed, some of the health that flows down across the green ridges from the skyline, and some of the beauty and spirit that are still available to any resident of the valley who has a moment and the wit to lift up his eyes unto the hills.