Joseph Obomsawin, the elder I lived with there, says that those who turn to animals do so because humans have let them down.

There are certain things that I'll hear about and that I think will make a great book and I put it in a file. Sometimes it's a situation that interests me, and I don't even realize what I'm trying to say about it until I get closer to it. Sometimes the book after that I've written 125 pages of, and I can tell you what the book is after that. I just sort of have a linear progression, but more than anything, the topics land in your lap. I don't feel that I go out searching for them.

He rises over me, a second sun, and fills me with light and heat.

you can love a person and still hate the decisions they've made, can't you?

But I didn't frame it; I put into an envelope and sealed it and stuffed it far back into a corner drawer of a filing cabinet. It's there, just in case one of these days I start to lose her. There might be a morning when I wake up and her face isn't the first thing I see. Or a lazy August afternoon when I can't quite recall anymore where the freckles were on her right shoulders. Maybe one of these days, I will not be able to listen to the sound of snow falling and hear her footsteps.

I know that the first person I kissed won't be nearly as important as the last person I kiss.

Beliefs are the roads we take to our dreams. Believe you can do something-or believe you can't-and you'll be right everytime.