Flying has changed how we imagine our planet, which we have seen whole from space, so that even the farthest nations are ecological neighbors. It has changed our ideas about time. When you can gird the earth at 1,000 m.p.h., how can you endure the tardiness of a plumber? Most of all, flying has changed our sense of our body, the personal space in which we live, now elastic and swift. I could be in Bombay for afternoon tea if I wished. My body isn't limited by its own weaknesses; it can rush through space.

I consider fiction a very high-class form of lying. I enjoy and admire it enormously, but I don't think I'm very good at it.

When I go biking, I am mentally far far away from civilization. The world is breaking someone else's heart.

As fleeting emotions stalk it, a face can leak fear or the guilt of a forming lie.

Home is where the heart is, we say, rubbing the flint of one abstraction against another.

The heart is a museum, filled with the exhibits of a lifetime's loves.

We're losing biodiversity globally at an alarming rate, and we need a cornucopia of different plants and animals, for the planet's health and our own.