“Mountains make poor receptacles for dreams.”

“I thought climbing the Devil's Thumb would fix all that was wrong with my life. In the end, of course, it changed almost nothing. But I came to appreciate that mountains make poor receptacles for dreams.”

“Rich men have dreams. Poor men die to make them come true.”

“The dreams of the rich, and the dreams of the poor - they never overlap, do they?See, the poor dream all their lives of getting enough to eat and looking like the rich. And what do the rich dream of?Losing weight and looking like the poor.”

“But to have dreamed the dream is to have flown above the mountains so high in all but deed.”

“They had come down from the back mountains and higher places to hold forth their hands for something they though civilisation could offer, and they never dreamed the sadness and the poor broken delusion of it. They didn't know that a bomb had come that could crack all our bridges and roads and reduce them to jumbles, and we would be as poor as they someday and stretching out our hands in the same, same way.”