"This book is magic!" - Bobbie Louise Hawkins

"Mountain people tend to be tough, daring, determined, and self-motivated. It's unclear how this happens. It's just there in daily living. One has to go out in a blizzard to get more firewood, or snowshoe to the store for supplies, or clamber up and down steep hillsides to get places. On mountain terrain, if someone doesn't care to walk, then it's time to move to the city and take a bus." - Jane Wodening

"I stopped crying and looked at her face and there it was. Her face, the expression, seemed to contain all of life, birth and death, dance and decay, flying and crawling. But it went beyond life. It was light and darkness. It was time relentless and the caught and savored instant. It held the idea of the lightest speck of dust at the top of the atmosphere and the heaviest jewel melted in magnum at the center of the earth. She seemed to be observing all of this with joyous fascination and passing it on to me effortlessly by simply allowing her face to reflect what she observed. What she showed me was life unseparated from death, from earth, life as energy, energy as the natural essence of being matter. She seemed to be observing all at once the whole universe, every speck, in some way or another bursting with this energy. Her death was only the end of one story." - from MOUNTAIN WOMAN TALES by Jane Wodening

"Gradually I saw his eyes become more open and at the same time felt his feet grip my hand and he stood or actually squatted in my hand and he was looking about rather dully and I began to think he might live though his mouth was still open. Then I wondered if he had a broken jaw and if so what would I feed him and all the time I felt like I was being watched by thirty or forty eyes. He got up then and went to my finger, which was the top of my hand and I felt that it was beginning to fog in on him where he was. Then he went to my knee, the obvious taking-off place and then he closed his beak, for which I would have liked to cheer but I refrained from cheering. He stood then on my knee and looked around, seeming to be getting his bearings and he did look at me a few times and he took his time, for which I was grateful, though I knew already that he was not in my hand anymore and I was sorry. But in my honor I must say I was more glad to see him fine than sorry he wasn't mine." -- from "Bird Journal"

"It was when I was eleven I gave up the human race . . . moving to the Rockies was the end . . . I took up with dogs."