The head has its confines. The head’s got those all right, and the heart. The heart has its reasons.

The proper word for me," Robin Goodman says, "is me.

I want to be bored. But I can't. But I really don't want to be this thing that I'm having to be instead of being bored.

It is important to know the stories and histories of things, even if all we know is that we don't know.

I went to the top of Vesuvius and looked in.

Thomas Teal, a luminous translator of Jansson's twin talent for surface and depth, simplicity and reverberation in language, and someone who knows exactly how to convey her gift for sensing the meaning embedded in the most mundane act or turn of phrase.

It's about the connecting force from form to form. It's the toe bone connecting to the shoulder bone. It's the bacterial kick of life force, something growing out of nothing, forming itself out of something else. Form never stops. And form is always environmental.