Finally, cooking is good citizenship. It's the only way to get serious about putting locally raised foods into your diet, which keeps farmlands healthy and grocery money in the neighborhood.

Fiction is a sort of inter-human magic, allowing you to travel into a scene and feel it tingle on your skin.

Scientific illiteracy in our populations is leaving too many of us unprepared to discuss or understand much of the damage we are wreaking on our atmosphere, our habitat, and even the food that enters our mouths.

I struggle with confidence, every time. I’m never completely sure I can write another book. Maybe my scope is too grand, my questions too hard, surely readers won’t want to follow me here. A novel is like a cathedral, it knocks you down to size when you enter into it.

High fashion has the shelf life of potato salad. And when past its prime, it is similarly deadly.

What you lose in blindness is the space around you, the place where you are, and without that you might not exist. You could be nowhere at all.

Downstream is always someone else's up.