For Lou Ann, life itself was a life-threatening enterprise.

My morning begins with trying not to get up before the sun rises. But when I do, it's because my head is too full of words, and I just need to get to my desk and start dumping them into a file. I always wake with sentences pouring into my head.

With all due respect for the wondrous ways people have invented to amuse themselves and one another on paved surfaces, I find that this exodus from the land makes me unspeakably sad. I think of the children who will never know, intuitively, that a flower is a plant's way of making love, or what silence sounds like, or that trees breathe out what we breathe in.

There's a graveyard in northern France where all the dead boys from D-Day are buried. The white crosses reach from one horizon to the other. I remember looking it over and thinking it was a forest of graves. But the rows were like this, dizzying, diagonal, perfectly straight, so after all it wasn't a forest but an orchard of graves. Nothing to do with nature, unless you count human nature.

The way I see it, a person isn't nothing more than a scarecrow... The only difference between one that stands up good and one that blows over is what kind of a stick they're stuck up there on.

Arguments could fill a marriage like water, running through everything, always, with no taste or color but lots of noise.

I've never gotten over high school, to the extent that I'm still a little surprised that my friends want to hang out with me.