Nothing is as far away as one minute ago.

I can look at my books with pleasure from a distance. Four feet is close enough.

Watching your daughter being collected by her date feels like handing over a million dollar Stradivarius to a gorilla.

True love is night jasmine, a diamond in darkness, the heartbeat no cardiologist has ever heard. It is the most common of miracles, fashioned of fleecy clouds - a handful of stars tossed into the night sky.

It is impossible to read for pleasure from something to which you are both father and mother, born in such travail that the writer despises the thing that enslaved him.

Death is as casual and often as unexpected as birth. It is as difficult to define grief as joy. Each is finite. Each will fade.

Archaeology is the peeping Tom of the sciences. It is the sandbox of men who care not where they are going; they merely want to know where everyone else has been.