One in 150 kids is autistic these days. The autism spectrum is growing.
Towns are like people. Old ones often have character, the new ones are interchangeable.
Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed. . . We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in.
We are the most dangerous species of life on the planet, and every other species, even the earth itself, has cause to fear our power to exterminate. But we are also the only species which, when it chooses to do so, will go to great effort to save what it might destroy.
National parks are the best idea we ever had. Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst.
We simply need that wild country available to us. . . For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.
One cannot be pessimistic about the West. This is the native home of hope. When it fully learns that cooperation, not rugged individualism, is the quality that most characterizes and preserves it, then it will have achieved itself and outlived its origins. Then it has a chance to create a society to match its scenery.
People fall in love and swear they are so sure, then they turn around and say it's over. I never trusted love to come any closer till the moment you were mine.
For we must be one thing or the other, an asset or a liability, the sinew in your wing to help you soar, or the chain to bind you to earth.
Such a caring for death, an awakening that keeps vigil over death, a conscience that looks death in the face, is another name for freedom.
And your own life while it's happening to you never has any atmosphere until it's a memory.