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

Country people tend to consider that they have a corner on righteousness and to distrust most manifestations of cleverness, while people in the city are leery of righteousness but ascribe to themselves all manner of cleverness.

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

The question of whether it's God's green earth is not at center stage, except in the sense that if so, one is reminded with some regularity that He may be dying.

Silence is exhilarating at first - as noise is - but there is a sweetness to silence outlasting exhilaration, akin to the sweetness of listening and the velvet of sleep.

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

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