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

It is our duty to preserve huge tracts of land in something resembling its native condition. The biological interactions necessary to insure the continuities of life are astonishingly complex, and cannot take place in islands of semiwilderness like the national parks.

A man ... needs to get out in the open air and sweat and blow off the stink.

Writing is a funny business. You sit in your room and listen to voices and write everything down. What kind of a profession is that?

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

Places come to exist in our imaginations because of stories, and so do we. When we reach for a "sense of place," we posit an intimate relationship to a set of stories connected to a particular location, such as Hong Kong or the Grand Canyon or the bed where we were born, thinking of histories and the evolution of personalities in a local context. Having "a sense of self" means possessing a set of stories about who we are and with whom and why.

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