Animals are stylized characters in a kind of old saga - stylized because even the most acute of them have little leeway as they play out their parts.

Summer is when we believe, all of a sudden, that if we just walked out the back door and kept on going long enough and far enough we would reach the Rocky Mountains.

It would be hard to define chaos better than as a world where children decide they don't want to live.

Animals used to provide a lowlife way to kill and get away with it, as they do still, but, more intriguingly, for some people they are an aperture through which wounds drain. The scapegoat of olden times, driven off for the bystanders sins, has become a tender thing, a running injury. There, running away is me: hurt it and you are hurting me.

Man is different from animals in that he speculates, a high-risk activity.

There were periods during my childhood when I stammered so badly I couldn't talk at all.

To live is to see, and traveling sometimes speeds up the process.