Another collection of beautiful words....

"Long ago when I had had a child sickness and nobody could tell what it was or how to treat it, my mother put me outside in a bed with mosquito netting over it, and I lay there watching mountains until they made me well. I knew that, when needed, mountains would move for me."

"It is surprising how much our souls are alike, at least in the presence of mountains. For all of us, mountains turn into images after a short time and the images turn true. Gold-tossed waves change into the purple backs of monsters, and so forth. Always something out of the moving deep, and nearly always oceanic. Never a lake, never a sky. But no matter what images I began with, when I watched long enough the mountains turned into dreams, and still do, and it works the other way around- often, waking from dreams, I know I have been in the mountains, and I know they have been moving- sometimes receding endlessly. Both mountains and dreams."

"But what I remember best is crawling out of the tent on summer nights when on high mountains autumn is always approaching. To a boy, it is something new and beautiful to piss among the stars. Not under the stars but among them. Even at night great winds seem always to blow on great mountains, and tops of trees bend, but, as the boy stands there with nothing to do but to watch, seemingly the sky itself bends and the stars blow down through the trees until the Milky Way becomes lost in some distant forest. As the cosmos brushes by the boy and disappears among the trees, the sky is continually replenished with stars. There would be stars enough to brush by him all night, but by now the boy is getting cold."

The Cook and the Hole in the Sky
~Norman Maclean