Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of
truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.
We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it — for a little while.
In that singular light every little tree and shock of wheat, every sunflower stalk and clump of snow-on-the-mountain, drew itself up high and pointed; the very clods and furrows in the fields seemed to stand up sharply.
Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky. The landscape one longed for when one was away, the thing all about one, the world one actually lived in, was the sky, the sky!
The dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the young.
It does not matter much whom we live with in this world, but it matters a great deal whom we dream of.
He had seen the end of an era, the sunset of the pioneer. He had come upon it when already its glory was nearly spent.
Only solitary men know the full joys of friendship. Others have their family — but to a solitary and an exile his friends are everything.
The great fact was the land itself, which seemed to overwhelm the little beginnings of human society that struggled in its sombre wastes.
Freedom so often means that one isn't needed anywhere. Here you are an individual, you have a background of your own, you would be missed.
I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.