Whatever landscape a child is exposed to early on, that will be the sort of gauze through which he or she will see all the world afterwards.

Towns are like people. Old ones often have character, the new ones are interchangeable.

I think, don't you, that a girl with any delicacy of feeling couldn't bring herself to marry a man indirectly responsible for her father's death. No matter how much she was in love with him.

After a day and a half or so the traveler will realize that crossing the continent by Interstate he gets to know the country about as well as a cable messenger knows the sea bottom.

Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed We need wilderness preserved — as much of it as is still left, and as many kinds — because it was the challenge against which our character as a people was formed We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.

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.

We were going to leave a mark on the world but instead the world left marks on us.