“If you added it up, without her there was nothing--but with her even the simplest of gestures of walking a bird dog in the desert, or selecting the ingredients for a meal for two rather than one took on an ineffable charm.(from the novella, Revenge)”

“His own life suddenly seemed repellently formal. Whom did he know or what did he know and whom did he love? Sitting on the stump under the burden of his father's death and even the mortality inherent in the dying, wildly colored canopy of leaves, he somehow understood that life was only what one did every day.... Nothing was like anything else, including himself, and everything was changing all of the time. He knew he couldn't perceive the change because he was changing too, along with everything else.(from the novella, The Man Who Gave Up His Name)”

“Nothing on my trip thus far was as I expected which shows you that rather than simply read about the United States you have to log the journey.”

“(from: Age Sixty-nine)There is this circle I walkthat I have learned to love.I hope one day to be a spiralbut to the birds I'm a circle.”

“It is easy to forget that in the main we die only seven times more slowly than our dogs.”

“This infantile sense of order tended to infect my life at large. Up at 5:30 a.m., coffee, oatmeal, perhaps sausage (homemade), and fresh eggs giving one of the yolks to Lola. Listening to NPR and grieving more recently over the absence of Bob Edwards who was the sound of morning as surely as birds. Reading a paragraph or two of Emerson or Loren Eiseley to raise the level of my thinking. Going out to feed the cattle if it was during our six months of bad weather.”

“Isabel saw all their lives becoming history in units of days and nights so fatally private there was no one left for her to love.”