Ruth believes that boys are not found around stables because what they like is taking things apart and putting them together again, and for this purpose horses are not so satisfactory as cars, motorcycles, and...

Knowledge extends in promontories and bays; or to put it vertically rather than horizontally, the strata from remote to recent never lie so unbroken that we cannot find some line of unconformity where the imagination...

A poem isn’t selfish. It speaks to people.

Oh, listen. Listen!’ A sound like a big crowd a good way off, excited and shouting, getting closer. We stand up and scan the empty sky. Suddenly there they are (the geese), a wavering V...

One cannot be pessimistic about the West. This is the native home of hope. When it fully learns that cooperation, not rugged individualism, is the quality that most characterizes and preserves it, then it will...

Wisdom. . .is knowing what you have to accept.

I can’t help remembering that good old wild Thoreau wound up a tame surveyor of Concord house lots. […] How would I know what it means? I don’t know what anything means. What it suggests...

Under the rough and ridiculous circumstances of life in the Rocky Mountains there was something exciting and vital, full of rude poetry: the heartbeat of the West as it fought its way upward toward civilization.

[Friendship] is a relationship that has no formal shape, there are no rules or obligations or bonds as in marriage or the family, it is held together by neither law nor property nor blood, there...

A poet is somebody who has written a poem.

I had stopped my chair at that exact place, coming out, because right there the spice of wisteria that hung around the house was invaded by the freshness of apple blossoms in a blend that...

I find it hard to describe what it is like to look fully into eyes that one has known that well–known better than one knows the look of one’s own eyes, actually–and then put away,...

There must be some other possibility than death or lifelong penance … some meeting, some intersection of lines; and some cowardly, hopeful geometer in my brain tells me it is the angle at which two...

I would like to hear your life as you heard it, coming at you, instead of hearing it as I do, a sober sound of expectations reduced, desires blunted, hopes deferred or abandoned, chances lost,...

It was as if she had thought him into existence again, as if her mind were a flask into which had been poured a measure of longing, a measure of discontent, a measure of fatigue,...

I can’t see that Danish episode as an adventure, or a crisis survived, or a serious quest for anything definable. It was just another happening like today’s luncheon, something I got into and got out...

Towns are like people. Old ones often have character, the new ones are interchangeable.

You wondered what was in whale’s milk. Now you know. Think of the force down there, just telling things to get born, just to be!”I had had no answer for her then. Now I might...

The creative writer is compulsively concrete . . . . His fictional house should be haunted by ideas, not inhabited by them; they should flit past the windows after dark, not fill the rooms. The...

It’s easier to die than to move … at least for the Other Side you don’t need trunks.

I am deep in my willed habits. From the outside, I suppose I look like an unoccupied house with one unconvincing night-light left on. Any burglar could look through my curtains and conclude I am...