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.

Long before morning I knew that what I was seeking to discover was a thing I’d always known. That all courage was a form of constancy. That it is always himself that the coward abandoned...

He is where he is supposed to be. And yet the place he has found is also of his own choosing. That is a piece of luck not to be despised.

He lay on his back in his blankets and looked our where the quartermoon lay cocked over the heel of the mountains. In the false blue dawn the Pleiades seemed to be rising up into...

He tried to read her heart in her handclasp but he knew nothing.

The dead boy in his arms hung with his head back and those partly opened eyes beheld nothing at all out of that passing landscape of street or wall or paling sky or the figures...

If war is not holy man is nothing but antic clay.

Words are things. The words he is in possession of he cannot be deprived of. Their authority transcends his ignorance of their meaning.

Each leaf that brushed his face deepened his sadness and dread. Each leaf he passed he’d never pass again. They rode over his face like veils, already some yellow, their veins like slender bones where...

Pick a man, any man. That man there. See him. That man hatless. You know his opinion of the world. You can read it in his face, in his stance. Yet his complaint that a...

If much in the world were mystery the limits of that world were not, for it was without measure or bound and there were contained within it creatures more horrible yet and men of other...

Anything that doesn’t take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.

You are either born a writer or you are not.

The heart beneath the breastbone pumping. The blood on its appointed rounds. Life in small places, narrow crannies. In the leaves, the toad’s pulse. The delicate cellular warfare in a waterdrop. A dextrocardiac, said the...

whoever approaches his goal dances

It’s a mystery. A man’s at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with. He can know his heart, but he dont want to. Rightly so. Best...

What could a child know of the darkness of God’s plan? Or how flesh is so frail it is hardly more than a dream

You keep runnin that mouth and I’m goin to take you back there and screw you.

He remembered Alejandra and the sadness he’d first seen in the slope of her shoulders which he’d presumed to understand and of which he knew nothing and he felt a loneliness he’d not known since...

I knew that what I was seeking to discover was a thing I’d always known. That all courage was a form of constancy. That it was always himself that the coward abandoned first. After this...

But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry (of life) will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only...

What’s the bravest thing you ever did?He spat in the road a bloody phlegm. Getting up this morning, he said.

I think if you were Satan and you were settin around tryin to think up somethin that would just bring the human race to its knees what you would probably come up with is narcotics.