Codi: Gives you the willies, doesn't it? The thought of raising kids in a place where the front yard ends in a two-hundred-foot drop? [referring to cliff dwellings] Loyd: No worse than raising up kids where the front yard ends in a freeway.

I don't understand how any good art could fail to be political.

Silence has many advantages…I write and draw in my notebook and I read anything I please.

Children can be your heartache. But that doesn't matter, you have to go on and have them . . . it works out.

But kids don't stay with you if you do it right. It's the one job where, the better you are, the more surely you won't be needed in the long run.

I can think of no honorable answer. Why must some of us deliberate between brands of toothpaste, while others deliberate between damp dirt and bone dust to quiet the fire of an empty stomach lining? There is nothing about the United States I can really explain to this child of another world.

As a biologist, I can't think of myself as anything but an animal among animals and plant.