“The mountains had their own time, and a wise man did not try to hurry them.”

“It wasn't a thing I had consciously missed, but having it now reminded me of the joy of it; that drowsy intimacy in which a man's body is accessible to you as your own, the strange shapes and textures of it like a sudden extension of your own limbs.”

“How shall I tell ye what it is, to feel the need of a place?" he said softly. "The need of snow beneath my shoon. The breath of the mountains, breathing their own breath in my nostrils as God gave breath to Adam. The scrape of rock under my hand, climbing, and the sight of the lichens on it, enduring in the sun and the wind."      His breath was gone and he breathed again, taking mine. His hands were linked behind mv head, holding me, face-to-face."If I am to live as a man, I must have a mountain," he said simply.”

“Time is a lot of the things people say that God is. There's always preexisting, and having no end. There's the notion of being all powerful-because nothing can stand against time, can it? Not mountains, not armies. And time is, of course, all-healing. Give anything enough time, and everything is taken care of: all pain encompassed, all hardship erased, all loss subsumed. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Remember, man, that thou art dust; and unto dust thou shalt return. And if time is anything akin to God, I suppose that memory must be the devil.”

“He had learned early on the trick of living separately in a crowd, private in his mind when his body could not be. But he was born a mountain-dweller, and had learned early, too, the enchantment of solitude, and the healing of quiet places.”

“One had known the care of other men from his earliest years, a part of the duty of his birthright; the other had come to it later, but both felt that burden to be the will of God, she had no doubt at all-both accepted that duty without question, would honor it, or die in trying. She only hoped it wouldn't come to that-for either of them.”

“I wondered what sort of man - or woman, perhaps? - had lain here, leaving no more than an echo of their bones, so much more fragile than the enduring rocks that sheltered them.”