The pain was quite extraordinary. And yet also weirdly welcome and restorative, bringing him news of his aliveness and his caughtness in a story larger than himself.

I find it a huge strain to be responsible for my tastes and be known and defined by them.

Patty knew, in her heart, that he was wrong in his impression of her. And the mistake she went to go on to make, the really big life mistake, was to go along with Walter's version of her in spite of knowing that it wasn't right. He seemed so certain of her goodness that eventually he wore her down.

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.

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

Everything he did was at least partial and often total bullshit” (402).

she was so much a personality and so little anything else that even staring straight at her he had no idea what she really looked like.