Don't worry about meaning. If a story's any good, it can't help but have meaning. Let the PhDs tell you what your story means.

What I wanted was some dreamlike Frank Lloyd Wright bungalow where we could sit on the veranda forever and it would always be twilight in the temperate zones, in the most beautiful house.

In a story, nothing is real until it is acted upon.

In learning to pay respectful attention to one another and plants and animals, we relearn the acts of empathy, and thus humility and compassion - ways of proceeding that grow more and more necessary as the world crowds in.

Our old pilgrims believed stories in which the West was a promise, a place where decent people could escape the wreckage of failed lives and start over. Come along, the dream whispers, and you can have another chance. We still listen to promises in the wind. This time, we think, we’ll get it right.

They knew bullshit, and they knew about the ruling class; dying for a ruling class cause was almost always bullshit.

One of finest evocations of life in Western America in recent memory... Powerful and profoundly moving.