“The only clouds are pale and thin, hung as high as they can manage, like cobwebs in the high arches of a stairwell, and the sky is a freshly scrubbed blue, as permanent-looking as the first day of the holidays.”

“It wasn't a pretty sunset. The colors were as expected: violet clouds, bright orange and pink underneath, against the pale blue sky. But the clouds were high cirrus, wispy, and crossed with the contrails of F-16s, a colorful glowing mess. I said, "It looks like God barfed a rainbow.”

“The sky was rarely more than pale blue or violet, with a profusion of mighty, weightless, ever-changing clouds towering up and sailing on it, but it has blue vigour in it, and at a short distance it painted the ranges of hills and the woods a fresh deep blue.”

“Patience. I colored patience gray, hung over with black clouds. I colored hope yellow, just like the sun we could see for a few short morning hours. Too soon the sun rose high in the sky & disappeared from view, leaving us bereft and staring at blue.”

“A sombrero fell out of the sky and landed on the main street of town in front of the mayor, his cousin, and a person out of work. The day was scrubbed clean by the desert air. The sky was blue. It was the blue of human eyes, waiting for something to happen. There was no reason for a sombrero to fall out of the sky. No airplane or helicopter was passing overhead and it was not a religious holiday.”

“The park is high. And as out of a houseI step out of its glimmering half-lightinto openness and evening. Into the wind,the same wind that the clouds feel,the bright rivers and the turning millsthat stand slowly grinding at the sky's edge.Now I too am a thing held in its hand,the smallest thing under the sky. --Look:Is that one sky?: Blissfully lucid blue,into which ever purer clouds throng,and under it all white in endless changes,and over it that huge, thin-spun gray,pulsing warmly as on red underpaint,and over everything this silent radianceof a setting sun. Miraculous structure,moved within itself and upheld by itself,shaping figures, giant wings, faultsand high mountain ridges before the first starand suddenly, there: a gate into suchdistances as perhaps only birds know...”