To lose a child ... was something that could end one's world. One could never get back to how it was before. The stars went out. The moon disappeared. The birds became silent.

I've always had a creative urge and I get immense satisfaction from creating something because it feels like I'm making sense of the world and imposing order on it.

Dogs are in on our human silliness; lions are not.

Small things may be important to us; to be a sometime anything is sometimes something.

Ritual is a terribly important, binding cement in a society. If we abandon formality and rituals, we're actually weakening the relationships that exist between people that bind.

We need to believe I think in justice. We need to run our lives as if justice existed... If we abandon a belief that justice will eventually be done, we make this world much more difficult for ourselves.

Whatever Scotland was, it was not a matriarchy; whereas the United States was a profoundly matriarchal society - and much more feminine than would be suggested by all that male bravado. That was a front, and a misleading one at that; underneath the male swagger lay a passive acceptance of female dominance - a fact not always appreciated by outsiders.