Sunrise is the time to feel that you will be able to find out how to help somebody close to you, who you think needs help even if he doesn't think so… - Norman Maclean

At sunrise everything is luminous but not clear.

In the Gates of the Mountains there have been many blowups. Now there are many rattlesnakes and nothing more fragile than mountain goats, themselves tougher than the mountains they disdain, although at a distance they are white wings of butterflies floating up and down and sideways across the faces of fragments of arches and cliffs, touching but never becoming attached to them.

You have never really seen an ass until you have seen two sunburned asses on a sandbar in the middle of a river.

But first of all he is a woodsman, and you aren't a woodsman unless you have such a feeling for topography that you can look at the earth and see what it would look like without any woods or covering on it. It's something like the gift all men wish for when they or young — or old — of being able to look through a woman's clothes and see her body, possibly even a little of her character.