This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind

The spaces between stars are where the work of the universe is done.

There is more time than there is expanse of the world and so any voyage at last will end.

Men and women are hard ore, we do not go to slag in a mere few seasons of forge.

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.

I got lit up like a church last night . . . Went home and threw my hat in the door first. It didn’t come back out, so I figured I was safe. . . .

As the fellow says, a fool and his money are soon parted, but ye can’t even get introduced around here.

Certain of himself, confident of what he could make in his mind, going through life as if he had always a following wind.

to speak that dialect called if

The university's preponderant "Greek system"—I never heard the words without the echo of the expression Dad and the valley men had for being deeply baffled: It's Greek to me —seemed to be meant to bin students into housefuls as alike themselves as could be achieved. It worked wonderfully; there were entire fraternities and sororities where everyone looked like a first cousin of everyone else. And the system's snugness paced itself on from there. Rush Week to Homecoming to winter proms to May Week and with keg parties and mixers betweentimes, residents of Greek Row could count on a college life as preciously tempoed as a cotillion.