I was not 15 anymore, and choices no longer had that same clear, bright edge to them.

My sentences tend to be very short and rather spare. I'm more your paragraph kind of gal.

I can always write. Sometimes, to be sure, what I write is crap, but it's words on the page and therefore it is something to work with.

The brave man, the real hero, quakes with terror, sweats, feels his very bowels betray him, and in spite of this moves forward to do the act he dreads.

But that Franklin trip changed me profoundly. As I believe wilderness experience changes everyone. Because it puts us in our place. The human place, which our species inhabited for most of its evolutionary life. That place that shaped our psyches and made us who we are. The place where nature is big and we are small.

We were too intelligent, too cynical for war. Of course, you don't have to be stupid and primitive to die a stupid, primitive death.

There are always a few who stand up in times of communal madness and have the courage to say that what unites us is greater than what divides us.