In the world of words, one of my best-loved tribes is the diatribe.

Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread. A civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principle of civilization itself.

King Arthur and his armored goons of the Round Table functioned as the Politburo of a slave state: Camelot. Of all who have written on the Matter of Arthur, from Malory to White, only Mark Twain understood this. But Mark Twain was a great writer.

There is a deep, abiding, unshakable satisfaction in a life of complete failure.

Susan Sontag: What she really wanted, throughout her career, was to grow up to be a Frenchman.

The one thing ... that is truly ugly is the climate of hate and intimidation, created by a noisy few, which makes the decent majority reluctant to air in public their views on anything controversial. ... Where all pretend to be thinking alike, it's likely that no one is thinking at all.

It may be true that there are no atheists in foxholes. But you don't find many Christians there, either. Or, about as many of one as the other.