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...

Well, I guess in all honesty I would have to say that I never knew nor did I ever hear of anybody that money didnt change.

I had two dreams about him after he died. I dont remember the first one all that well but it was about meetin him in town somewheres and he give me some money and I...

John Grady looked at the table. The paper cat stepped thin and slant among the shapes of cats thereon. He looked up again. Yessir, he said. Just me and him.

All my life, he said, I been witness to people showin up where they was supposed to be at various times after they’d said they’d be there. I never heard one yet that didnt have...

You know we talked about where people go when they die. I just believe you go someplace and I seen her layin there and I thought maybe she wouldn’t go to heaven because, you know,...

This country was filled with violent children orphaned by war.

A big lemoncolored cat watched him from the top of a woodstove. He turned his head to see it better and it elongated itself like hot taffy down the side of the stove and vanished...

Rich dreams now which he was loathe to wake from. Things no longer known in the world. The cold drove him forth to mend the fire. Memory of her crossing the lawn toward the house...

Where men can’t live gods fare no better.

In the grueling light that passed for day…

The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it...

I don’t know why I started writing. I don’t know why anybody does it. Maybe they’re bored, or failures at something else.

At one time in the world there were woods that no one owned

Don’t take in no strangers while I’m gone.She sighed deeply. They ain’t a soul in this world but what is a stranger to me, she said.

It looks a lot better from up here than it does down there, dont it? Yes. It does. There’s a lot of things look better at a distance. Yeah? I think so. I guess there...

Then don’t. I can’t help you. They say that women dream of danger to those in their care and men of danger to themselves. But I don’t dream at all. You say you can’t? Then...

I think by the time you’re grown you’re as happy as you’re goin to be. You’ll have good times and bad times, but in the end you’ll be about as happy as you was before....

All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one’s heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes.