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

Much of life becomes background, but it is the province of art to throw buckets of light into the shadows and make life new again.

Though we marry as adults, we don't marry adults. We marry children who have grown up and still rejoice in being children, especially if we're creative.

Mystery causes a mental itch, which the brain tries to soothe with the balm of reasonable talk.

What an odd, ruminating, noisy, self-interrupting conversation we conduct with ourselves from birth to death.

Nothing is more memorable than a smell. One scent can be unexpected, momentary and fleeting, yet conjure up a childhood summer beside a lake in the mountains; another, a moonlit beach; a third, 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. Hit a tripwire of smell and memories explode all at once. A complex vision leaps out of the undergrowth.

Habitats keep evolving new pageants of species, and we shouldn't interfere.