What scrunched under our overshoes as we trudged through the stubble of the grainfield was the nasty mix of moistureless snow and windblown dirt that we called “snirt.
Anyone who grows up around farm animals cannot side with a wolf in the long clash of things. But you can be against tormenting any creature.
What is Imagination but mental mischief of a kind, and why can’t the youngster protectively occupy himself with invention of that sort before maturity works him over?
What a wealth we are granted, in the books that carry the best in us through time.
Provider of moonbeams when I wanted full illumination.
It takes a collector to know a collector, even if you do stack your treasures in your head instead of out on a shelf.
It’s funny about imagination, how it.
Believe me, I have looked this up, and the roots of fate and faith are not the same. Nonetheless, I picked up my wicker suitcase to follow Herman the German into the Old Faithful Inn.
THAT BEGAN a spell of time when the high point of my days was the sugar on my cereal.
Twelve years old was awfully early to meet up with what inevitability does to possibility.
If I have learned anything in a lifetime spent overseeing schools, it is that childhood is the one story that stands by itself in every soul.
She came to the ranch on one of the first pale chilly days of an autumn, hired to cook for us for a few months, and stayed on in our lives for almost three years. Her time with us is a strange season all mist and dusk and half-seen silhouettes, half-heard cries. there is nothing like it in the sortings of my memory.
In a time like that, the past meets you wherever you turn. The days do not use their own hours and minutes, they find ones you have lived through with the person you are missing.
In Montana, it is a good idea to keep your hat on your head so the wind doesn’t blow your hair off.
People come and go in our lives; that’s as old a story as there is. But some of them the heart cries out to keep forever; and that is a fresh saga everytime.
Although I was the one cast out alone onto a transcontinental bus, home was running away from me.
Hooting and hollering, the crowd reliably responded as if that were the height of humor, while Herman slapped me on the back and nearly fell off his gunnysack seat guffawing and I laughed as hard as if I hadn’t heard that mossy joke at every rodeo I had ever been to. Life can tickle you in the ribs surprisingly when it’s not digging its thumb in.
There are so goddamn many ways to be a fool a man can’t expect to avoid them all.
The circumference of love depends on the angle you see it from, I learned in the course of that madcap week after Father proposed to Rose.
Latin was not a hard topic at all compared to romance, from what I could see.
What is that feeling when you’re driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? – it’s the too-huge world vaulting us, and it’s good-by. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies. – JACK KEROUAC, On the Road.