He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.

Suppose two men at cards with nothing to wager save their lives. Who has not heard such a tale? A turn of the card. The whole universe for such a player has labored clanking to...

Summer was full on and the nights hot. It was like lying in warm syrup there in the dark under the viaduct, in the steady whine of gnats and nightbugs

The stories get passed on and the truth gets passed over. As the sayin goes. Which I reckon some would take as meanin that the truth cant compete. but I dont believe that. I think...

The one thing I can tell you is that you wont survive for yourself. I know because I would never have come this far. A person who had no one would be well advised to...

He rose and turned toward the lights of town. The tidepools bright as smelterpots among the dark rocks where the phosphorescent seacrabs clambered back. Passing through the salt grass he looked back. The horse had...

Nobody wants to be here and nobody wants to leave.

Men do not turn from God so easily. Not so easily. Deep in each man is the knowledge that something knows of his existence. Something knows, and cannot e fled nor hid from. To imagine...

The names of entities that have the power to constrain us change with time. Convention and authority are replaced by infirmity. But my attitude toward them has not changed. Has not changed.

When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he’d reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each...

Best way to live in California is to be from somewheres else.

Now the son whose father’s existance in this world is historical and speculative even before the son has entered it in a bad way. All his life he carries before him the idol of a...

The priest therefore saw what the anchorite could not. That God needs no witness. Neither to himself nor against. The truth is rather that if there were no God then there could be no witness...

I can normally tell how intelligent a man is by how stupid he thinks I am.

By the time I was sixteen I had read many books and I had become a freethinker.

No one can tell you what your life is goin to be, can they?No. It’s never like what you expected.Quijada nodded. If people knew the story of their lives how many would then elect to...

How would you know if you were the last man on Earth? He said.I don’t guess you would know it. You’d just be it.

By day the banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp.

This is my child, he said. I wash a dead man’s brains out of his hair. That is my job.

This is an orchestration for an event. For a dance in fact. The participants will be apprised of their roles at the proper time. For now it is enough that they have arrived. As the...

They began to come upon chains and packsaddles, singletrees, dead mules, wagons. Saddletrees eaten bare of their rawhide coverings and weathered white as bone, a light chamfering of miceteeth along the edges of the wood....

He could not construct for the child’s pleasure the world he’d lost without constructing the loss as well and he thought perhaps the child had known this better than he.

She looked up at him and her face was pale and austere in the uplight and her eyes lost in their darkly shadowed hollows save only for the glint of them and he could see...

There is no book and your fathers are dead in the ground.

He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs...

Carry the fire.

White pussy is nothin but trouble.

For this world also which seems to us a thing of stone and flower and blood is not a thing at all but a tale. And all in it is a tale and each tale...

I tried to put things in perspective but sometimes you’re just too close to it.

There was someone there and they had been there. There was no one there. There was someone there and they had been there and they had not left but there was no one there.

You call forth the world which God has formed and that world only. Nor is this life of yours by which you set such store your doing, however you may choose to tell it. Its...

No lists of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later. All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one’s heart...

I like what I do. Some writers have said in print that they hated writing and it was just a chore and a burden. I certainly don’t feel that way about it. Sometimes it’s difficult....

Your heart’s desire is to be told some mystery. The mystery is that there is no mystery.

They camped that night on the foreplain at the foot of a talus slope and the murder that had been reckoned upon took place.

He lay listening to the water drip in the woods. Bedrock, this. The cold and the silence. The ashes of the late world carried on the bleak and temporal winds to and fro in the...

When we’re all gone at last then there’ll be nobody here but death and his days will be numbered too. He’ll be out in the road there with nothing to do and nobody to do...

It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The...

This ferry was taken over by the Yumas and operated for them by a man named Callaghan, but within days it was burned and Callaghan’s headless body floated anonymously downriver, a vulture standing between the...

the beast who dreams of man and has so dreamt in running dreams a hundred thousand years and more. Dreams of that malignant lesser god come pale and naked and alien to slaughter all his...

It was a lone tree burning on the desert. A heraldic tree that the passing storm had left afire. The solitary pilgrim drawn up before it had traveled far to be here and he knelt...

in that cold autistic dark.

He stood at the window of the empty cafe and watched the activites in the square and he said that it was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they...

Keep a little fire burning; however small, however hidden.

Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of...

Even a nonbeliever might find it useful to model himself after God. Very useful, in fact.

This place aint the same. It never will be. Maybe we’ve all got a little crazy. I guess if everbody went crazy together nobody would notice, what do you think?

You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.

He said that that what men do not understand is that what the dead have quit is itself no world but is only the picture of the world in men’s hearts. He said that the...

He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought that the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a...