"Everything about Great Salt Lake is exaggerated—the heat, the cold, the salt, and the brine," 3.

"In Mormon culture, that is one of the things you do know—history and genealogy," 13.

"It is here in the marshes with the birds that I seal my relationship to Great Salt Lake," 22.

"I know the solitude my mother speaks of. It is what sustains me and protects me from my mind," 29.

"The cancer process is not unlike the creative process. Ideas emerge slowly, quietly, invisibly at first. They divide and multiply, become invasive," 44.

"California has lost 95% of its wetlands over the past one hundred years," 111.

"Maybe it is not the darkness we fear most, but the silences contained within the darkness," 146.

"The hostility of this landscape teaches me how to be quiet and unobtrusive, how to find grace among spiders with a poisonous bite," 147.

"The summer days have been...