On Winter:
“Now, I can live with harsh winters. I lived four years in Kremmling, where the daily high was often below zero, and the nightly lows reached Siberian depths. But coping with hard winters is like changing diapers – I may know how to do it, but that doesn’t mean I like it.”
“There is Winter, also known as Ski Season. It is followed by Mud Season, which overlaps with Tick Season, and that’s a transition to Summer, also known as Tourist Season. After Labor Day, it morphs into Aspen-Viewing Season. Meanwhile, there’s also Firewood-Gathering Season, which halts for Big-Game Season, when it feels risky to go outdoors for any other purpose. That gets us to Ski Season and the start of a new year.”
On Woodstoves:
“If you figured the time involved in driving to the forest to gather and cut the wood, wood heat would make Nike’s Third World shoe mills look generous.”
“The wind can howl, the snow can drift, the thermometer can plunge, the electric power can even go out – and I can still be drowsily sprawled near the stove, as comfortable as the two house cats that doze nearby.”
On Sports:
“I like baseball. It’s the only game played without a clock, and we live in a society that has too many damn clocks.”
“I was a hard-core baseball fan. I followed the Mantle and Maris home-run derby devoutly in the summer of 1961, I played constantly with friends when I should have been doing homework, and I desperately envied a cousin in Arvada who had been to an Actual Major-League Game in Chicago.”
“I wouldn’t walk across the street to see a NASCAR event. But if there are people willing to pay for hours of sweltering in the sun amid ear-splitting noise while eagerly awaiting energetic collisions, and some entrepreneur wishes to profit from them, then fine by me.”
“Since I’ve never attended a football game in either Boulder or Fort Collins, and I generally manage to avoid those boot-licking ‘Coach, tell us what a genius you are’ television programs that often air after the nightly news, I’m sure I could live without big-time college football in Colorado.”
On the Press:
“Every time a newspaper has changed hands, and the new owner has said ‘You’re really an asset to this organization, Quillen, and we want to keep on you the team,’ I’ve lost my job shortly thereafter.”
“Why bother with the complication of government censorship when the press usually does such a good job, all on its own, of keeping us ignorant?”
On Writing:
“As writing is taught in the lower grades, it’s an adjunct to the obsolete and tedious art of penmanship. In the upper grades, the student is graded not by how convincingly he says whatever he has to say, but by his assemblage of 3×5 cards and footnotes. Get to college, and the student who writes a simple declarative sentence, instead of a pompous farrago of dependent clauses and passive verb constructions, is the student who will fail.”
On Highways:
“Down here, when you turn off U.S. 285 onto Colo. 291, it says ‘Salida 10.’ It’s more like seven miles; if you insist on driving 10, you’re either on your way to Cañon City, or you’re cruising F Street with the teenagers.”
On Conservatives:
“It’s hard to determine whether wood heat is conservative or liberal. It’s a traditional American activity, which should make it conservative, except that many modern conservatives don’t have much use for other American traditions, like civil liberties or fiscal responsibility.”
On the Capital:
“We need to elevate our capital, and we could move it to Salida. It’s near the middle of the state, it finished fourth in the election that made Denver the capital, and it’s 7,036 feet high, thus putting Santa Fe in its place.”
On Boulder:
“The City of Boulder does have a reputation. Where else would someone get fined $1,000 for making a poodle’s hair pink?”
On the Stupid Zone:
“From the Denver metro area, though, the quickest route to the Stupid Zone involves driving southwest. I can’t give you directions to the ‘expensive houses built on an unstable hillside’ Stupid Zone, since I can’t find that clipping in my Stupid Zone of ‘stuff that I might need someday.’”
