There must be some other possibility than death or lifelong penance, said the Ellen Ward of my dream, that woman I hate and fear. I am sure she meant some meeting, some intersection of lines; and some cowardly, hopeful geometer in my brain tells me it is the angle at which two lines prop each other up, the leaning together from the vertical which produces the false arch.

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.

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

Hard writing makes easy reading.

It is the abiding concern of thinking people to preserve what keeps men human-to save our contact with nature of which we are a part.

I balked at nothing, I was above nothing. Everything had something to teach me.

I gave my heart to the mountains the minute I stood beside this river with its spray in my face and watched it thunder into foam, smooth to green glass over sunken rocks, shatter to foam again. I was fascinated by how it sped by and yet was always there; its roar shook both the earth and me.