A dog is a bond between strangers.
My own journey started long before I left, and was over before I returned.
My wants are simple. I have no desire to latch onto a monster symbol of fate and power and prove my manhood in titanic piscine war. But sometimes I do like a couple of cooperative fish of frying size.
In early June the world of leaf and blade and flowers explodes, and every sunset is different.
You got to live before you can afford to die.
A boy becomes a man when a man is needed.
I am writing this from what we Americans call Yurrp. In Yurrp writers are taken as seriously as Lana Turner’s legs are in America – a ridiculous situation.
Rich, poor, Panhandle, Gulf, city, country, Texas is the obsession, the proper study, and the passionate possession of all Texans.
A few miles south of Soledad, the Salinas River drops in close to the hillside bank and runs deep and green. The water is warm too, for it has slipped twinkling over the yellow sands in the sunlight before reaching the narrow pool.
I suffer as always from the fear of putting down the first line. It is amazing the terrors, the magics, the prayers, the straightening shyness that assails one.
In uncertainty I am certain that underneath their topmost layers of frailty men want to be good and want to be loved.
Change was everywhere. People were gone, or changed, and that was almost like being gone.
It’s one of the great fallacies, it seems to me, that time gives much of anything but years and sadness to man.
That man who is more then his elements knows the land that is more than its analysis.
On all levels American society is rigged. I am troubled by the cynical immorality of my country. It cannot survive on this basis.
I see too many men delay their exits with a sickly, slow reluctance to leave the stage. It’s bad theater as well as bad living.
Trips to fairly unknown regions should be made twice; once to make mistakes and once to correct them.
Guys like us, that work on ranches, are the loneliest guys in the world.
There is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter.
No one knows my ability the way I do. I am pushing against it all the time.