Our loneliness makes us avid column readers these days.

Many people have believed that they were Chosen, but none more baldly than the Texans.

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.

If a person sings quietly to himself on the street people smile with approval; but if he talks it's not alright; they think he's crazy. The singer is presumed to be happy and the talker unhappy.

No birdcall is the musical equal of a clarinet blown with panache.

Indeed, if "biology is chemistry with history," as somebody has said, then nature writing is biology with love.

The novelist screws up his courage in order to invest another two or three years in another attempt to float a boat of original design upon an invented ocean.