There is, after all, a kind of happiness in unhappiness, if it's the right unhappiness.

Then she waited, with parted lips and a saucy challenge in her eyes, to see how her presence -- the drama of being her -- was registering. In the way of such chicks, she seemed convinced of the originality of her provocation.

When I was younger, the main struggle was to be a 'good writer.' Now I more or less take my writing abilities for granted, although this doesn't mean I always write well.

For every reader who dies today, a viewer is born, and we seem to be witnessing . . . the final tipping balance.

I've moved away from that sort of deep-ecological extremism. I started to think: what can we do for wild birds right now? I don't want these particular species to disappear.

Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive– my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity.

We may freak out globally, but we suffer locally.