Come to think of it, just about every tool was shaped like either a weenie or a pistol, depending on your point of view.

I look at my four boys, who are the colors of silt, loam, dust, and clay, an infinite palette for children of their own, and I understand that time erases whiteness altogether.

Why does a person even get up in the morning? You have breakfast, you floss your teeth so you'll have healthy gums in your old age, and then you get in your car and drive down I-10 and die. Life is so stupid I can't stand it.

It's surprising how much memory is built around things unnoticed at the time.

Nothing to do with nature, unless you count human nature.

A careless way of sauntering across the earth and breaking open its treasures, a terrible dependency on sucking out the world's best juices for ourselves-these may also be our enemies. The changes we dread most may contain our salvation.

I'm never going to tell the reader what to believe; I'm going to examine these characters that believe different ways, and examine their motives.