“No life goes past so swiftly as an eventless one, no clock spins like a clock whose days are all alike.”

“His clock was set on pioneer time. He met trains that had not yet arrived, he waited on platforms that hadn't yet been built, beside tracks that might never be laid.”

“A western buckaroo, I share his scorn for people who go camping by the book, relying on the authority of some half-assed assistant scoutmaster whose total experience outdoors probably consists of two overnight hikes and a weekend in the Catskills. But we have just had that confrontation. The one who goes by Pritchard's book is Sid's wife, and I am wary. It is not my expedition. I am a guest here.”

“We have been cut off, the past has been ended and the family has broken up and the present is adrift in its wheelchair. ... That is no gap between the generations, that is a gulf. The elements have changed, there are whole new orders of magnitude and kind. [...]My grandparents had to live their way out of one world and into another, or into several others, making new out of old the way corals live their reef upward. I am on my grandparents' side. I believe in Time, as they did, and in the life chronological rather than in the life existential. We live in time and through it, we build our huts in its ruins, or used to, and we cannot afford all these abandonings.”

“There is one thing above all others that I despise. It is fingers, especially female fingers, messing around in my guts. My guts, like Victorian marriage, are private.”

“I shall be richer all my life for this sorrow”

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