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 sensi….

Up there on Huckleberry Mountain, I couldn't sleep ... As the sky broke light over the peaks of Glacier, I found myself deeply moved by the view from….

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

I wonder what my father saw in his most secret sight of the right life. It's my guess he wanted to live out his life surrounded by friends and childr….

The ecology of the valley was complex beyond our understanding, and it began to die as we went on manipulating it in ever more frantic ways. As it we….

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..

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

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….

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 tempera….

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 ov….

In learning to pay respectful attention to one another and plants and animals, we relearn the acts of empathy, and thus humility and compassion - way….

I want to think I deserve what I get. I don't want to consider how vastly I am overly rewarded. I don't want to consider the injustices around me. I ….

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 ….

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

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

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 und….

It is our duty to preserve huge tracts of land in something resembling its native condition. The biological interactions necessary to insure the cont….

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

Places come to exist in our imaginations because of stories, and so do we. When we reach for a "sense of place," we posit an intimate relationship to….

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?.