Our old pilgrims believed stories in which the West was a promise, a place where decent people could escape the wreckage of failed lives and start over. Come along, the dream whispers, and you can have another chance. We still listen to promises in the wind. This time, we think, we’ll get it right.

They knew bullshit, and they knew about the ruling class dying for a ruling class cause was almost always bullshit.

We live in stories. What we are is stories. We do things because of what is called character, and our character is formed by the stories we learn to live in.

One of finest evocations of life in Western America in recent memory... Powerful and profoundly moving.

What I wanted was some dreamlike Frank Lloyd Wright bungalow where we could sit on the veranda forever and it would always be twilight in the temperate zones, in the most beautiful house.

In a story, nothing is real until it is acted upon.

We tell stories to talk out the trouble in our lives, trouble otherwise so often so unspeakable. It is one of our main ways of making our lives sensible. Trying to live without stories can make us crazy. They help us recognize what we believe to be most valuable in the world, and help us identify what we hold demonic.

It is a skill we learn early, the art of inventing stories to explain away the fearful scared strangeness of the world. Storytelling and make-believe, like war and agriculture, are among the arts of self-defense, and all of them are ways of enclosing otherness and claiming ownership.

Writing is a funny business. You sit in your room and listen to voices and write everything down. What kind of a profession is that?

We continually use stories to hold up as mirrors to ourselves.

In learning to pay respectful attention to one another and plants and animals, we relearn the acts of empathy, and thus humility and compassion - ways of proceeding that grow more and more necessary as the world crowds in.

A man ... needs to get out in the open air and sweat and blow off the stink.

I had discovered a terrible vulnerability I myself which I think of not as cowardliness but as an ability to imagine too much.

The specific danger is us we are rampant this earth is our only friend we are destroying it increment by increment at a horrific rate. We must understand that we can't buy it back.

Don't worry about meaning. If a story's any good, it can't help but have meaning. Let the PhDs tell you what your story means.

It is our duty to preserve huge tracts of land in something resembling its native condition. The biological interactions necessary to insure the continuities of life are astonishingly complex, and cannot take place in islands of semiwilderness like the national parks.