Our old pilgrims believed stories in which the West was a promise, a place where decent people could escape the wreckage of failed lives and start over. Come along, the dream whispers, and you can have another chance. We still listen to promises in the wind. This time, we think, we’ll get it right.

William Kittredge

Places come to exist in our imaginations because of stories, and so do we. When we reach for a "sense of place," we posit an intimate relationship to a set of stories connected to a particular location, such as Hong Kong or the Grand Canyon or the bed where we were born, thinking of histories and the evolution of personalities in a local context. Having "a sense of self" means possessing a set of stories about who we are and with whom and why.

William Kittredge

intimate-relationships mean thinking

In learning to pay respectful attention to one another and plants and animals, we relearn the acts of empathy, and thus humility and compassion - ways of proceeding that grow more and more necessary as the world crowds in.

William Kittredge

learning motivational inspirational

We live in stories. What we are is stories. We do things because of what is called character, and our character is formed by the stories we learn to live in.

William Kittredge

stories character

I wonder what my father saw in his most secret sight of the right life. It's my guess he wanted to live out his life surrounded by friends and children and fertile fields of his own designing. I tihnk he wanted to die believing he had been in one the creation of a good sweet place. Those old pilgrims believed stories in which the West was a promise, a far away place where decent people could escape the wreckage of the old world and start over. Come to me, the dream whispers, and you can have one more chance.

William Kittredge

dream sweet children

I want to think I deserve what I get. I don't want to consider how vastly I am overly rewarded. I don't want to consider the injustices around me. I don't want any encounters with the disenfranchised. I want to say it's not my fault. But it is, it's yours and mine, and ours. We'd better figure out ways to spread some equity around if we want to go on living in a society that is at least semi-functional. It's a fundamental responsibility, to ourselves.

William Kittredge

environmental responsibility thinking

It is our duty to preserve huge tracts of land in something resembling its native condition. The biological interactions necessary to insure the continuities of life are astonishingly complex, and cannot take place in islands of semiwilderness like the national parks.

William Kittredge

continuity-of-life environmental islands

A man ... needs to get out in the open air and sweat and blow off the stink.

William Kittredge

blow sea men

The specific danger is us; we are rampant; this earth is our only friend; we are destroying it increment by increment at a horrific rate. We must understand that we can't buy it back.

William Kittredge

sustainability environmental earth

We continually use stories to hold up as mirrors to ourselves.

William Kittredge

mirrors use stories

Don't worry about meaning. If a story's any good, it can't help but have meaning. Let the PhDs tell you what your story means.

William Kittredge

stories worry mean

The ecology of the valley was complex beyond our understanding, and it began to die as we went on manipulating it in ever more frantic ways. As it went dead and empty of the old life it became a place where no one wanted to live. In our right minds we want to seek out places that reek of complexity. Our drive to industrialize soured and undercut the intimacies that drew most people to country life in the first place.

William Kittredge

land country people

Writing is a funny business. You sit in your room and listen to voices and write everything down. What kind of a profession is that?

William Kittredge

voice writing rooms

Up there on Huckleberry Mountain, I couldn't sleep ... As the sky broke light over the peaks of Glacier, I found myself deeply moved by the view from our elevation - off west the lights of Montana, Hungry Horse, and Columbia Falls, and farmsteads along the northern edge of Flathead Lake, and back in the direction of sunrise the soft and misted valleys of the parklands, not an electric light showing: little enough to preserve for the wanderings of a great and sacred animal who can teach us, if nothing else, by his power and his dilemma, a little common humility.

William Kittredge

horse sleep fall

What I wanted was some dreamlike Frank Lloyd Wright bungalow where we could sit on the veranda forever and it would always be twilight in the temperate zones, in the most beautiful house.

William Kittredge

twilight house beautiful

It is a skill we learn early, the art of inventing stories to explain away the fearful scared strangeness of the world. Storytelling and make-believe, like war and agriculture, are among the arts of self-defense, and all of them are ways of enclosing otherness and claiming ownership.

William Kittredge

war believe art

In a story, nothing is real until it is acted upon.

William Kittredge

real stories

One of finest evocations of life in Western America in recent memory... Powerful and profoundly moving.

William Kittredge

powerful memories moving

They knew bullshit, and they knew about the ruling class; dying for a ruling class cause was almost always bullshit.

William Kittredge

bullshit dying class

I had discovered a terrible vulnerability I myself which I think of not as cowardliness but as an ability to imagine too much.

William Kittredge

too-much fear thinking

We tell stories to talk out the trouble in our lives, trouble otherwise so often so unspeakable. It is one of our main ways of making our lives sensible. Trying to live without stories can make us crazy. They help us recognize what we believe to be most valuable in the world, and help us identify what we hold demonic.

William Kittredge

crazy trying believe