wherever you find the greatest good, you will find the greatest evil, because evil loves paradise as much as good.

The perfect weather of Indian Summer lengthened and lingered, warm sunny days were followed by brisk nights with Halloween a presentiment in the air.

I was shaped by the west and have lived most of my life in it, and nothing would gratify me more than to see it in all its subregions and subcultures both prosperous and environmentally healthy, with a civilization to match its scenery.

You have to get over the color green; you have to quit associating beauty with gardens and lawns; you have to get used to an inhuman scale; you have to understand geological time.

She had rooms in her mind that she would not look into.

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.

Values, both those that we approve and those that we don't, have roots as deep as creosote rings, and live as long and grow as slowly