Craig Childs famous quotes

In the desert, the two primary elements are stone and water. Stone comes in abundance, exposed by weathering and a lack of vegetation. It is a canvas. Water crosses this stone with such rarity and ferocity that it tells all of its secrets in the shapes left behind.
-- Craig Childs

#Two #Water #Secret

Most animals show themselves sparingly. The grizzly bear is six to eight hundred pounds of smugness. It has no need to hide. If it were a person, it would laugh loudly in quiet restaurants, boastfully wear the wrong clothes for special occasions, and probably play hockey.
-- Craig Childs

#Hockey #Animal #Play

Old customs are easy to forget with the flashing of events in our lives. Easy to forget, like the heavy clothing we once wore to survive the winters. It is an old custom, the handing down of things. A good knife, a well-made pipe, a heavy robe. Tradition falls prey to constant change, and creativity becomes so revered that the past is a relic, only to be admired. But in this coat, I was held to the earth, pulled to the past by its weight.
-- Craig Childs

#Fall #Creativity #Winter

There are two easy ways to die in the desert - thirst and drowning.
-- Craig Childs

#Two #Desert #Way

The land is not old. It only changes, becoming one thing and the next. We are the ones who ascribe age, the brevity of our lives demanding a beginning, middle and end.
-- Craig Childs

#Becoming One #Land #Age

There is a drop of blood in the snow before me.... The coyote... is in estrus.... spurred to let out a bit of herself, sending a message, telling everyone she was now ready, that the clock of her winter was ticking toward spring.
-- Craig Childs

#Spring #Winter #Blood

On numerous visits to Manhattan, I have found myself poking around the city trying to find a moment of quiet and once located a hint of it in Central Park during a windless, late-night snowfall. There I stood absolutely still in the lemon glow of the city, a sky full of snow. The city still roared from all sides, a thousand noises compressed down to just one. I counted that distant, mild roar as quiet, a welcome relief from the more pressing noises of the daytime city.
-- Craig Childs

#Night #Sky #Cities

But Piglet is so small that he slips into a pocket, where it is very comfortable to feel him when you are not quite sure whether twice seven is twelve or twenty-two.

If there is any way you can get colder than you do when you sleep in a bedding roll on the ground in a tent in southern Tunisia two hours before dawn, I don't know about it.

I want to leave my readers with a sequence of ideas/phrases that makes them question something they'd taken for granted. Or that confuses them to the point that they laugh, but contains one or two phrases/lines that stick in their minds.

If a literary man puts together two words about music, one of them will be wrong.

I'm Mozart with a focus on the tide Hiding the inconsistencies of man behind water and wine

That's a bit like asking a man crawling across the Sahara whether he would prefer Perrier or Malvern water.

Congenial labor is the secret of happiness.

Don't Let Him Know is a rich, evocative and brilliantly told tale of family, of loyalties, and of love that must stay secret. Sandip Roy has broken new ground in this tale of the modern Indian family. A lovely read

One of my secrets is to joke all the time.

All tastes have the quality of being in some way artificial and invented. The secret of life is to have enough detachment from your tastes and your values to see that they are a little bit absurd.