Scientists' minds may jump around like amorous toads, but they do seem to accept such behavior in one another.

Imagine, [Kriezler] said, that you enter a large, somewhat crumbling hall that echoes with the sounds of people mumbling and talking repetitively to themselves. All around you these people fall into prostrate positions, some of them weeping. Where are you? Sara’s answer was immediate: in an asylum. Perhaps, Kreizler answered, but you could also be in a church. In the one place the behavior would be considered mad; in the other, not only sane, but as respectable as any human activity can be.

She has that quality, does the Hudson, as I imagine all great rivers do: the deep, abiding sense that those activities what take place on shore among human beings are of the moment, passing, and aren't the stories by way of which the greater tale of this planet will, in the end, be told.

Still, it's an interesting technique-leaving one person behind in order to find her or him somewhere else. And in someone else.

It didn’t make any more sense to me then than it does now, how life can pile troubles up on a man what don’t deserve them, while letting some of the biggest jackasses and scoundrels alive waltz their way through long, untroubled existences.

I was a pretty angry kid, and I got into military history largely as a way to vent my own anger. As I got older it narrowed down to a more specific focus on individual violence. I'm just trying to understand where it came from.

So if it seems that some of what I'll have to say in the pages to come doesn't reflect the mellowing of age, that's only because I've never found that life and memories respond to time the way that tobacco does.