Things that live by night live outside the realm of 'normal' time and so suggest living outside the realm of good and evil, since we have moralistic feelings about time. Chauvinistic about our human need to wake by day and sleep by night, we come to associate night dwellers with people up to no good at a time when they have the jump on the rest of us and are defying nature, defying their circadian rhythms.

A self is a frightening thing to waste, it's the lens through which one's whole life is viewed, and few people are willing to part with it, in death, or even imaginatively, in art.

Variety is the pledge that matter makes to living things.

Wonder is a bulky emotion. When you let it fill your heart and mind, there isn't room for anxiety, distress or anything else.

Smell brings to mind... a family dinner of pot roast and sweet potatoes during a myrtle-mad August in a Midwestern town. Smells detonate softly in our memory like poignant land mines hidden under the weedy mass of years.

I watched her face switch among the radio stations of memory

So often loneliness comes from being out of touch with parts of oneself. We go searching for those parts in other people, but there's a difference between feeling separate from others and separate from oneself.