I do have a strong sense of an order in the universe.

Burroughs's voice is hard, derisive, inventive, free, funny, serious, poetic, indelibly American.

As it happened, I didn't grow up to be the kind of woman who is the heroine in a Western, and although the men I have known have had many virtues and have taken me to live in many places I have come to love, they have never been John Wayne, and they have never taken me to the bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow. Deep in that part of my heart where artificial rain forever falls, that is still the line I want to hear.

It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive.

That no one dies of migraine seems, to someone deep into an attack, an ambiguous blessing.

we are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. as we were. as we are no longer. as we will one day not be at all.

I learned early to keep death in my line of sight, keep it under surveillance, keep it on cleared ground and away from any brush where it might coil unnoticed.