Our waking life's desire to shape the world to our convenience invites all manner of paradox and difficulty.

Because the question for me was always whether that shape we see in our lives was there from the beginning or whether these random events are only called a pattern after the fact. Because otherwise we are nothing.

In the nights sometimes now he'd wake in the back and freezing waste out of softly colored worlds of human love, the songs of birds, the sun.

There was nothin to set a man's mind at ease like wakin up in the morning and not havin to decide who you were.

Fear of an enemy can often blind men to other hazards, not least the shape which they themselves make in the world.

What he loved in horses was what he loved in men, the blood and the heat of the blood that ran them. All his reverence and all his fondness and all the leanings of his life were for the ardenhearted and they would always be so and never be otherwise. (All the Pretty Horses)

He may be dead; or he may be teaching English.