I'd rather get a brain tumor than go back to teaching.

Some people hear their own inner voices with great clearness and they live by what they hear. Such people become crazy, or they become legends.

When we were children we were errant enough to wish to be birds for the day but there's nothing easier to lose than playfulness.

After a lifetime of world travel I've been fascinated that those in the third world don't have the same perception of reality that we do.

I thought, frankly, that it would be more pleasant to write a memoir than it was.

Fate has never ladled out hardship very evenly, and this frequently trips our often infantile sense of justice.

This infantile sense of order tended to infect my life at large. Up at 5:30 a.m., coffee, oatmeal, perhaps sausage (homemade), and fresh eggs giving one of the yolks to Lola. Listening to NPR and grieving more recently over the absence of Bob Edwards who was the sound of morning as surely as birds. Reading a paragraph or two of Emerson or Loren Eiseley to raise the level of my thinking. Going out to feed the cattle if it was during our six months of bad weather.