American individualism, much celebrated and cherished, has developed without its essential corrective, which is belonging.

I shall be richer all my life for this sorrow

Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.

If there is such a thing as being conditioned by climate and geography, and I think there is, it is the West that has conditioned me. It has the forms and lights and colors that I respond to in nature and in art. If there is a western speech, I speak it; if there is a western character or personality, I am some variant of it; if there is a western culture in the small-c , anthropological sense, I have not escaped it. It has to have shaped me. I may even have contributed to it in minor ways, for culture is a pyramid to which each of us brings a stone.

Hard writing makes easy reading.

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

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.