James Dickey

"I decided that survival was not in the rivets and the metal, and not in the double-sealed doors and not in the marbles of Chinese checkers. It was in me. It came down to the man, and what he could do. The body is the one thing you cant fake; its just got to be there."

"I was standing in the most absolute aloneness that I had ever been given."

"What a view, I said again. The river was blank and mindless with beauty. It was the most glorious thing I have ever seen. But it was not seeing, really. For once it was not just seeing. It was beholding. I beheld the river in its icy pit of brightness, in its far-below sound and indifference, in its large coil and tiny points and flashes of the moon, in its long sinuous form, in its uncomprehending consequence."

"She is watching her country lose its evoked master shape watching it lose And gain get back its houses and peoples watching it bring up Its local lights single homes lamps on barn roofs."

"There was nothing in common, in the way he was lying, with any of the positions I had seen him in while he was alive, until I remembered the pose by the river in which I had most wanted to kill him. He now had that same relaxed, enjoying look of belonging anywhere he happened to be, and particularly in the woods."

"That’s all anybody has got. It depends on how strong your fantasy is, and whether you really — really — in your own mind, fit into your own fantasy, whether you measure up to what you’ve fantasized. I don’t know what yours is, but I’ll bet you don’t come up to it."

"The river and everything I remembered about it became a possession to me, a personal, private possession, as nothing else in my life ever had. Now it ran nowhere but in my head, but there it ran as though immortally. I could feel it -- I can feel it -- on different places on my body.... In me it still is, and will be until I die, green, rocky, deep, fast, slow, and beautiful beyond reality."

"Nobody worth a damn could ever come from such a place. It was nothing, like most places and people are nothing."

"Drunk on the wind in my mouth, Wringing the handlebar for speed, Wild to be wreckage forever."

"I have just come down from my father. Higher and higher he lies Above me in a blue light Shed by a tinted window."

"I saw for a blazing moment The great grassy world from both sides, Man and beast in the round of their need."

"With the plane nowhere and her body taking by the throat The undying cry of the void falling living beginning to be something That no one has ever been and lived through screaming without enough air."