The Sixties were different in an isolated place. We got two television channels if the wind was blowing in the right direction. The radio stations went off at sundown. Then you picked up Chicago and heard the teenage music you really yearned for.

I do the same things I did when I was 12 years old: I ride bikes, I read books, I walk in the woods. And I listen to music.

It is best not to study too much on who gets what they deserve. It can lead to an overly complicated interpretation of God's personal attributes.

Needing and getting don’t seem likely to match up any time soon... What needs doing is mine to do.

He was himself a case in point, and perhaps not a rare one, for his spirit, it seemed, had been burned out of him but he was yet walking.

So of course time is necessary. But nevertheless damn painful, for it transforms all the pieces of your life - joy and sorrow, youth and age, love and hate, terror and bliss - from fire into smoke rising up the air and dissipating on a breeze.

Ask her what she craved, and she'd get a little frantic about things like books, the woods, music. Plants and the seasons. Also freedom. Not being bought and sold by some idiot employer, not having the moments of her days valued in fractions of a dollar by somebody other than herself.