A border--the perimeter of a single massive or stretched-out use of territory--forms the edge of an area of 'ordinary' city. Often borders are thought of as passive objects, or matter-of-factly just as edges. However, a border exerts an active influence.

To science, not even the bark of a tree or a drop of pond water is dull or a handful of dirt banal. They all arouse awe and wonder.

There are dangers in sentimentalizing nature. Most sentimental ideas imply, at bottom, a deep if unacknowledged disrespect. It is no accident that we Americans, probably the world's champion sentimentalizers about nature, are at one and the same time probably the world's most voracious and disrespectful destroyers of wild and rural countryside.

The trouble with paternalists is that they want to make impossibly profound changes, and they choose impossibly superficial means for doing so.

New ideas often need old buildings.

Detroit is largely composed, today, of seemingly endless square miles of low-density failure.

People who think of themselves as exiles, I find, can never really put their lives together, really.