Bernard DeVoto

One may lack words to express the impact of beauty but no one who has felt it remains untouched. It is renewal, enlargement, intensification. The parks preserve it permanently in the inheritance of the American citizens.

California was almost entirely a dream, a dream vague but deep in the minds of a westering people.

The nation had had two symbols of solitude, the forest and the prairies; now it had a third, the mountains.