"It shouldn't be hard to imagine just what most of the crew must have thought when they first looked across the open hill-side and saw their boss seemingly playing with a matchbook in dry grass. Although the Mann Gulch fire occurred early in the history of the Smokejumpers, it is still their special tragedy, the one in which their crew suffered almost a total loss and the only one in which their loss came from the fire itself. It is also the only fire any member of the Forest Service had ever seen or heard of in which the foreman got out ahead of his crew only to light a fire in advance of the fire he and his crew were trying to escape. In case I hadn't understood him the first time, Sallee repeated, "We thought he must have gone nuts." A few minutes later his fire became more spectacular still, when Sallee, having reached the top of the ridge, looked back and saw the foreman enter his own fire and lie down in its hot ashes to let the main fire pass over him."

“Painted on one side of our Sunday school wall were the words, God is Love. We always assumed that these three words were spoken directly to the four of us in our family and had no reference to the world outside, which my brother and I soon discovered was full of bastards, the number increasing rapidly the farther one gets from Missoula, Montana.”

“Unless we are willing to escape into sentimentality or fantasy, often the best we can do with catastrophes, even our own, is to find out exactly what happened and restore some of the missing parts — hopefully, even the arch to the sky.”

“Excerpt from Young Men and Fire”

“Help," he said "is giving part of yourself to somebody who comes to accept it willingly and needs it badly.”

“As a Scot and a Presbyterian, my father believed that man by nature was a mess and had fallen from an original state of grace. Somehow, I early developed the notion that he had done this by falling from a tree. As for my father, I never knew whether he believed God was a mathematician but he certainly believed God could count and that only by picking up God's rhythms were we able to regain power and beauty. Unlike many Presbyterians, he often used the word "beautiful.”

“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.”