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

What a lonely species we are, searching for signals of life from other galaxies, adopting companion animals, visiting parks and zoos to commune with other beasts. In the process, we discover our shared identity.

I don't want to get to the end of my life and find that I lived just the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.

Writer's block is a luxury most people with deadlines don't have.

Our sense of safety depends on predictability, so anything living outside the usual rules we suspect to be an outlaw, a ghoul.

...for most people in the [Jewish] Ghetto [of Warsaw] nature lived only in memory -- no parks, birds, or greenery existed in the Ghetto -- and they suffered the loss of nature like a phantom-limb pain, an amputation that scrambled the body's rhythms, starved the senses, and made basic ideas about the world impossible for children to fathom.

habit, a particularly insidious thug who chokes passion and smothers love. Habit puts us on autopilot.