National parks are the best idea we ever had. Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst.

I wonder if ever again Americans can have that experience of returning to a home place so intimately known, profoundly felt, deeply loved, and absolutely submitted to? It is not quite true that you can't go home again. I have done it, coming back here. But it gets less likely. We have had too many divorces, we have consumed too much transportation, we have lived too shallowly in too many places.

The flimsy little protestations that mark the front gate of every novel, the solemn statements that any resemblance to real persons living or dead is entirely coincidental, are fraudulent every time. A writer has no other material to make his people from than the people of his experience ... The only thing the writer can do is to recombine parts, suppress some characterisitics and emphasize others, put two or three people into one fictional character, and pray the real-life prototypes won't sue.

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.

I consider the integrity of the material to be of greater value than any message I might want to get across.

I am impressed by how much of my grandparent's life depended on continuities, contacts, connections, friendships, and blood relationships.

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.