The desert preserves. What other lands destroy, the desert keeps. It accepts dead things, holds them close, and draws away the rot that would destroy; given time, it mummifies or crystalizes.
This is a story of an adventure in education, pursued not under the best of conditions.
Such are the amenities of social life, which oft makes a liar of the best of men.
Give the brain encouragement from study, from thinking, from visualizing and no drugs are needed.
Folks who have lived the cornered sort of life most scholars, teachers, and storekeepers live seldom realize what they’ve missed in the way of conversation. Some of the best talk and the wisest talk I’ve ever heard was around campfires, in saloons, bunkhouses, and the like. The idea that all the knowledge of the world is bound up in schools and schoolteachers is a mistaken one.
I was by no means a scholar, simply an interested reader with nothing to do but live and learn.
Well, I’ve often been wrong, but this time I was right and they had to pay mind to me or bury me, and mine is a breed that dies hard.
Need and desire have no connection,′ I said. ‘Many people desire things they do not need. Happiness can be measured by what one does not need, but often to see is to want.
For it is given that no man can do it all, that each must carry the future forward a few years and then pass the message on to him who follows.
A name is what a man makes it,” I.
A quiet man I was, and not one to provoke a quarrel, but if set upon I would fight back. I do not say this in boasting, for it was as much a part of me as the beating of my heart. It was bred in the blood-line of those from whom I come, and I could not be other than I am.
My folks built blood into the foundations of this country and I don’t aim to see them torn down for no reason whatsoever.
The clouds hung like dark, blowing tapestries in the gaps of the hills.
Since I was a small boy, I had watched that forest for enemies or for game, and I knew its every mood and shading, how the sunlight fell through the leaves and where the shadows gathered. It held no mysteries for me but much of memory. I had played there as a child with Yance, Jubal, and Brian, later with Noelle. We had climbed its trees, picked berries there, and played hide-and-seek under its branches.
Ma’am,” I said, “I’d have liked it, having you for a ma.
He had fought for a principle, and because it was his nature to fight.
It is a poor sort of man who is content to be spoon-fed knowledge that has been filtered through the canon of religious or political belief, and it is a poor sort of man who will permit others to dictate what he may or may not learn.
All that was speculation, and a man can get carried away by a reasonable theory. Often a man finds a theory that explains things and he builds atop that theory, finding all the right answers... only the basic theory is wrong. But that’s the last thing he will want to admit.
What so many of us who abhor violence often forget is that we have peace and civilized lives because there were men and women who went before us who were willing to fight for our freedom to live in peace.
We must not lose touch with what we were, with what we had been, nor must we allow the well of our history to dry up, for a child without tradition is a child crippled before the world. Tradition can also be an anchor of stability and a shield to guard one from irresponsibility and hasty decision.