“farther west, a raven floated down the road like an escort, a companion, making sure I got home all right.”
Source: The Sky, The Stars, The Wilderness: Three Lyrical Short Stories of Texas, Appalachia, and the Untamed American West
“His beautiful silver hair had turned snow white over the course of just a few days following Chubb's death, and in a way this made him seem younger: made him seem to fit the white caliche landscape even better, and blend in.
His skin was turning whiter, too, even after he had been out in the sun,
It was beautiful, watching him get old-ancient-now that I had realized he too was going to die. This time I could understand it. It was like watching some graceful diver plunge in slow motion-the slowest-from the top of an improbably high cliff, down to the cool river below.”
Source: The Sky, The Stars, The Wilderness: Three Lyrical Short Stories of Texas, Appalachia, and the Untamed American West
“I knew that I was losing him, and yet we all had the courage to draw closer, to weave tighter, even all the way into the end.
Fred worked in the study, under the glow of yellow light, like an angel-we could see him in there, through the glass doors-while the rest of us sat or lay on the patio under the sky and the stars. Sometimes Grandfather would reach down, searching for my hand, find it, and squeeze it. The last bloodline of my mother, I would think, holding his hand-my last, strongest blood-connection to her-and perhaps he was thinking the same, at those times.
Father and Omar intent upon the game. Grandfather and I intent upon eternity.”
Source: The Sky, The Stars, The Wilderness: Three Lyrical Short Stories of Texas, Appalachia, and the Untamed American West
“I remember one of the last things Mother said to us, one of the very last things. In my mind, it has become the last thing, and maybe it was.
She was lying on the cedar frame bed in the back bed-room in the early summer, with the bed moved over right against the window. The window was open to let the breeze and birdsong and sunlight in, the light rushing in through the lace curtains. She had lost a lot of weight and had had a hard time, but was never more beautiful in the way that there can be nothing more beautiful than dignity.
"I've seen a lot," she said, and smiled, and it was not an act for us, it was not a thing said for our benefit. She was just saying it, and smiling. She was just brave, was all.”
Source: The Sky, The Stars, The Wilderness: Three Lyrical Short Stories of Texas, Appalachia, and the Untamed American West
“And it occurred to me by the time I was a teenager that I had become part of the land, every bit as much a part of it as sparrow eggs or thrasher nest, garter snake or oak tree, and that the rest of my life, or anyone's life, would be a gradual learning process, a journey toward fitting into one's home, for those of us lucky enough to still recognize what is home...that which we are a part of, rather than estranged from. And rather than using the word "lucky," perhaps I should use the word grace.”
Source: The Sky, The Stars, The Wilderness: Three Lyrical Short Stories of Texas, Appalachia, and the Untamed American West
“I went up to the cliff and sat and felt my heart thumping inside. I breathed the cold air and watched the moon climb higher until it, and all of the country below, was mine again.”
Source: The Sky, The Stars, The Wilderness: Three Lyrical Short Stories of Texas, Appalachia, and the Untamed American West
“I love the past so much because I love the present. I know I have to go into the world and become shaped, altered, bent, myself-individuated-and that there will be pain and joy in the process. I am not the land itself, neither am I a clone of my family. But the magnitude of my attachment to these things-and the stability it affords-staggers me.”
Source: The Sky, The Stars, The Wilderness: Three Lyrical Short Stories of Texas, Appalachia, and the Untamed American West
“Grandfather died a few days after his hundredth birthday. Both Father and I were there at the end, in the room where I'd been born, forty-four years ago. It was not unlike that day, with sunlight streaming through the windows, and hummingbirds hovering outside, iridescent sun-glittering flashes of jewels. A dove was calling, back in the cool shade. Grandfather's hand was cool, as cool as the river. He tried to sit up to look out at the sunlight.
"Sycamores grow by running water," he sang, "cottonwoods by still water," and then he died, and I felt a century slip away.”
Source: The Sky, The Stars, The Wilderness: Three Lyrical Short Stories of Texas, Appalachia, and the Untamed American West
“Is it odd to picnic at one's mother's grave? To sit up on the cliff and trickle pebbles over the ledge and listen to them bounce until they disappear? To eat an apple, to feel the sun, and to remember her, she who gave so much that it will never diminish? Is it odd to live with ehr in you, to continue to share your days and thoughts with the presence of her loving spirit?”
Source: The Sky, The Stars, The Wilderness: Three Lyrical Short Stories of Texas, Appalachia, and the Untamed American West
“I think even then I knew Omar would be going away, would be leaving the land to explore cities and towns. But still I tried as hard as I could-it was my job-to plant a sense of the wild within him: something that calls one back into the interior, back into the shadows and safety of a place that still has reverence to it. Within every atom of it.”
Source: The Sky, The Stars, The Wilderness: Three Lyrical Short Stories of Texas, Appalachia, and the Untamed American West
“The way he learned to sing was by imitating the songbirds: their warbles and whistles, their scolds. Before his stroke he'd been able to imitate certain notes and melodies of their calls, but never whole songs.
I was sitting under the umbrella with him, in early March-March second, the day the Texas Declaration of Independence had been signed, when Grandfather began to sing. A black-and-white warbler had flown in right in front of us and was sitting on a cedar limb, singing-relieved, I think, that we weren't owls. Cedar waxwings moved through the brush behind it, pausing to wipe the bug juice from their bills by rubbing their beaks against branches (like men dabbing their mouths with napkins after getting up from the table). Towhees were hopping all around us, scratching through the cedar duff for pill bugs, pecking, pecking, pecking, and still the vireo stayed right there on that branch, turning its head sideways at us and singing, and Grandfather made one deep sound in his throat-like a stone being rolled away-and then he began to sing back to the bird, not just imitating the warbler's call, but singing a whole warbler song, making up warbler sentences, warbler declarations.
Other warblers came in from out of the brush and surrounded us, and still Grandfather kept whistling and trilling. More birds flew in. Grandfather sang to them, too. With high little sounds in his throat, he called in the mourning doves and the little Inca doves that were starting to move into this country, from the south, and whose call I liked very much, a slightly younger, faster call that seemed to complement the eternity-becking coo of the mourning dove.
Grandfather sang until dark, until the birds stopped answering his songs and instead went back into the brush to go to roost, and the fireflies began to drift out of the bushes like sparks and the coyotes began to howl and yip. Grandfather had long ago finished all the tea, sipping it between birdsongs to keep his voice fresh, and now he was tired, too tired to even fold the umbrella.
....
I was afraid that with the miracle of birdsong, it was Grandfather's last night on earth-that the stars and the birds and the forest had granted him one last gift-and so I drove slowly, wanting to remember the taste, smell, and feel of all of it it, and to never forget it. But when I stopped the truck he seemed rested, and was in a hurry to get out and go join Father, who was sitting on the porch in the dark listening to one of the spring-training baseball games on the radio.”
Source: The Sky, The Stars, The Wilderness: Three Lyrical Short Stories of Texas, Appalachia, and the Untamed American West
“I sat in the back with Omar napping against my right shoulder and Mother napping against my left, and I thumbed through the bird book and looked at pictures of all the new birds I had seen, and at the ones I had not seen. It was unimaginable to think that they were out there-all these hundreds, even thousands of birds-and that I had not seen them. I felt both hungry and sated-like a cat, I imagined. With Mother asleep on my shoulder, good crisp air coming in the window, a stomach full of flounder, and two dozen new birds flying through my mind-and returning home-I felt like there couldn't be a more satisfied person in the world.
This, in turn, made me hungrier: made me want to see more.”
Source: The Sky, The Stars, The Wilderness: Three Lyrical Short Stories of Texas, Appalachia, and the Untamed American West
“I imagined they had been listening for me, but still had not heard me drive up, which made me realize how old they really were: Grandfather, old beyond his time, and Father, old before his time.”
Source: The Sky, The Stars, The Wilderness: Three Lyrical Short Stories of Texas, Appalachia, and the Untamed American West
“I pointed to a red-tailed hawk half a mile above us. I watched the hawk to see if it was Chubb. Strange things happen in the animal world when a loved one dies, that's a fact. They honor our passage with far more reverence than we do theirs.”
Source: The Sky, The Stars, The Wilderness: Three Lyrical Short Stories of Texas, Appalachia, and the Untamed American West
“Did he know he was going to die?" I asked, and Grandfather looked at me in surprise-his little granddaughter again.
"He was eight-seven," he said in his stroke language. Grandfather studied my face carefully then, missing nothing. He watched my face the way he would have watched the cedars for a songbird he was trying to lure in with his screech owl calls. I was the young woman who would be burying him. He was trying to have it both-the afterlife and the here. His face was as curious as a young boy's.”
Source: The Sky, The Stars, The Wilderness: Three Lyrical Short Stories of Texas, Appalachia, and the Untamed American West
“I remember a game Omar and I used to play, when we were small. Scorpions would glow in the dark, after we'd loaded them up with light by shining our flashlight on them. Not every scorpion would glow like this, but some would-about one in a hundred, maybe one in a thousand. We'd lift up rocks, under the moonlight, and shine our lights on the scorpions' backs, looking for such a specimen. And then when we'd find one, we'd fill him with the light from our flashlights, then shut the lights off and follow him, glowing in the dark, across the caliche streambeds, across the slick rock, and across the hills, following him until the glimmer faded, and there was only silence.”
Source: The Sky, The Stars, The Wilderness: Three Lyrical Short Stories of Texas, Appalachia, and the Untamed American West
“I am increasingly unsure of the division we put between the past and the present. It seems, the more time I spend wandering the land, seeing the things my parents saw, and feeling the same things, almost as if I am, at times, them-as if our biological progress has been so infinitesimal that there's no significant difference between us-that there is no true fence, no stone wall, between the present and the past: that we construct (out of fear, or hunger for the future, gluttony, these fences behind us; that we turn our backs on who and what we really are-who and what we still are.”
“Omar doesn't have any children, either. I suppose the land is all we will leave behind. In that way it is both our parents and our children.
The land grows flowers for me to lay at the feet of Mother's grave, there under the big tree. I cut the flowers with scissors and carry them up there, but I am just a medium, a conduit, for that flow. It is really the land that is doing it.”
Source: The Sky, The Stars, The Wilderness: Three Lyrical Short Stories of Texas, Appalachia, and the Untamed American West
“It is a gradual kind of strengthening. It takes a long time to see how the losses build you up, rather than strip you down and wear you away.”
Source: The Sky, The Stars, The Wilderness: Three Lyrical Short Stories of Texas, Appalachia, and the Untamed American West
“I wondered why, after such a great loss, they ever let us out of their sight. Later I realized that it was their way of fighting that loss, sitting there in the darkness and feeling, vicariously, our hearts running through the night, and through the woods-a way of speaking to the sorrow, and to Mother, too-a way of saying that all had not been for naught, that her children's lives and joy would be irrepressible, because they had come out of her.”
Source: The Sky, The Stars, The Wilderness: Three Lyrical Short Stories of Texas, Appalachia, and the Untamed American West
“We must participate in this world that has birthed us. We must not sit around in rawhide rocking chairs with our heads sunk in grief, while the waters trickle past. We must join the waters.”
Source: The Sky, The Stars, The Wilderness: Three Lyrical Short Stories of Texas, Appalachia, and the Untamed American West
“Even up until the final moment of life, bat and moth are linked together forever, through time, and beyond. As a last-gasp evasive maneuver, a fleeing moth will sometimes stop its wingbeats in midflight, thereby ceasing to give off data to the bat's radar. But sometimes the bat will pause, too, so that the moth can't pick up any radar signals-the bat seeming to have disappeared-and for just the briefest of moments they will both hang there, suspended in eternity.”
Source: The Sky, The Stars, The Wilderness: Three Lyrical Short Stories of Texas, Appalachia, and the Untamed American West
“When the longhorns could be gathered up and driven, it was theorized that the heat from the herd's mass attracted lightning. (Such was the radiant heat from a large herd that a cowboy's face would be blistered on whichever side of the herd he'd ridden by the day's end.) Their great horns also seemed to attract electricity, so that lightning and ground-electricity would bounce around from horn to horn throughout the herd - a phantasmagoric burning blue circuitry. The cracking of the cowboy's whips and the twitching of the cattle's tails also emitted sparkling "snakes of fire.”
Source: The New Wolves: The Return of the Mexican Wolf to the American Southwest
“They're old letters from this fellow Chubb and I used to know," he sang, almost in a whisper, and I imagined that the birds, if they could hear him, rustled in their sleep, on their roosts: his words entering their dreams, calling to them.”
Source: The Sky, The Stars, The Wilderness: Three Lyrical Short Stories of Texas, Appalachia, and the Untamed American West
“In four more years, after Grandfather died, Father would move to Fredericksburg and start a garden: not yet tired of living, but tired, I knew, of wondering what he had missed.”
Source: The Sky, The Stars, The Wilderness: Three Lyrical Short Stories of Texas, Appalachia, and the Untamed American West
“I live here on the Prade Ranch alone-already years beyond the age my mother was when she returned to the ranch-to the particular elements of the earth: soil, water, carbon sky. You can rot or you can burn but either way, if you're lucky, a place will shape and cut and bend you, will strengthen you and weaken you. You trade your life for the privilege of this experience-the joy of a place, the joy of blood family; the joy of knowledge gotten by listening and observing.
For most of us, we get stronger slowly, and then get weaker slowly, with our cycles sometimes in synchrony with the land's health, though other times independent of its larger cycles. We watch and listen and notice as the land, the place -life- begins to summon its due from us. It's so subtle...a trace of energy departing here, a trace of impulse missing there. You find yourself as you have always been, square in the middle of the metamorphosis, constantly living and dying: becoming weaker in your strength, finally. Perhaps you notice the soil, the rocks, or the river, taking back some of that which it has loaned to you; or perhaps you see the regeneration occurring in your daughter, if you have one, as she walks around, growing stonger. And you feel for the fir time a sweet absence...”
“Sometimes you can look right at a thing and not see it. Where’s the pepper, where’s the cumin, where’s the spatula, where’s my joy?”
Source: The Traveling Feast: On the Road and at the Table with My Heroes
“Sara would listen for his plane in the afternoons. It did not make sense, but she could hear it even before the dogs could.”
Source: Where the Sea Used to Be
“Sometimes they would fly down to the coast, near Mobile, land the plane on a lonely stretch of beach, and get out and walk along the shore, in winter: no one else out. He would lean slightly forward, listening to the slow, steady lapping of waves dying into the shore. He would hold Sara's hand. If she tried to speak while he was listening, imagining, he would raise a finger to his lips. The only reason he could have two passions rather than one was because he had never ruined the first. It hadn't ever been sold, when asked for. She watched him watch the beach, the ocean, and considered his success”
Source: Where the Sea Used to Be
“Ive lost much of my heart and the spark or fire that once created, or produced, the art of fiction.”
“The Ploughmen is part inspired fever-dream, part adventure story, a lyric parable of not just goodand evil but of the vast and beautiful and often lonely country in-between. Kim Zupan is a wonder.”
“The seams, the laminae between the various worlds the past present and future as well as the living and the nonliving may not be as distinct and clear-cut as we have been taught or as our somewhat arbitrary clocks and calendars have led us to believe.”
“I do not concern myself with my inability to feel such comfort amidst humans (other than with very few friends and family), but, rather, am simply thankful that at least dogs exist, and I’m humbly aware of how much less a person I’d be – how less a human – if they did not exist.”
Source: Colter: The True Story of the Best Dog I Ever Had
“How we fall into grace. You can't work or earn your way into it. You just fall. It lies below, it lies beyond. It comes to you, unbidden.”
Source: Colter: The True Story of the Best Dog I Ever Had
“If it's wild to your own heart, protect it. Preserve it. Love it. And fight for it, and dedicate yourself to it, whether it's a mountain range, your wife, your husband, or even (god forbid) your job. It doesn't matter if it's wild to anyone else: if it's what makes your heart sing, if it's what makes your days soar like a hawk in the summertime, then focus on it. Because for sure, it's wild, and if it's wild, it'll mean you're still free. No matter where you are.”
“The heart of it all is mystery, and science is at best only the peripheral trappings to that mystery--a ragged barbed-wire fence through which mystery travels, back and forth, unencumbered by anything so frail as man's knowledge.”
“There are none among us who have not been, even for a moment, cruel to those whom we love most, as if unable, in that moment, to shoulder any longer the magnificent weight and burden, the responsibility, of that love.”
Source: The Sky, the Stars, the Wilderness
“Write every day. Don't ever stop. If you are unpublished, enjoy the act of writing—and if you are published, keep enjoying the act of writing. Don't become self-satisfied, don't stop moving ahead, growing, making it new. The stakes are high. Why else would we write?”
“It is a kind of church, back in these last cores. It may not be your church -- this last one percent of the West – but it is mine, and I am asking unashamedly to be allowed to continue worshipping the miracle of the planet, and the worship of a natural system not yet touched, never touched by the machines of man. A place with the residue of God – the scent, feel, sight, taste, and sound of God – forever fresh upon it”
Source: The book of Yaak
“Live long enough and all weaknesses will be illuminated, but again perhaps that is not all bad for cannot they then begin to become strengths?”
“Sometimes I perceive that there is a stillness and a wholeness in the world or in some portion or corner or fragment of the world or some little place in time where things just feel so right and huge and powerful and easy that I will have the perhaps blasphemous thought maybe there are layers of heaven.”
“Nothing will get you into trouble so deep or as sad as faith.”
Source: The Watch: Stories
“Fit in where you don't: make your own space..be different..don't give in. Exist somewhere you're not suppose to, or where you don't want to. Be your own men; do what you want, and don't hurt anybdoy”
“I've heard it said that when you die you enter a room of bright light, and that you can smell bread baking just around the corner.”
Source: The Hermit's Story: Stories
“The future's so random, and so mobile, there's no way you're going to get to your vision of what you want your community to be just by chance alone. I really believe you have to let people know, to use your voice, to say, 'this is what I like about my place, I want to keep it this way, this is what I think can be improved, this is what I disapprove of.' That's the only way you can have a part in shaping the future.”
“The mountains have always been here, and in them, the bears.”
Source: The Lost Grizzlies: A Search for Survivors in the Wilderness of Colorado
“Nature, and the original system that created us, must always remain somehow with us, the bedrock of our movements and actions. What is our duty? To live a life.”
Source: The Lost Grizzlies: A Search for Survivors in the Wilderness of Colorado
“A novel that features real people is complicated, but in the end, that extra challenge is all for the good.”
“Fiction is harder for me than nonfiction - more gratifying, as a result, when it succeeds.”
“My life, I realize suddenly, is July. Childhood is June, and old age is August, but here it is, July, and my life, this year, is July inside of July.”
