She wants to know if I love her, that's all anyone wants from anyone else, not love itself but the knowledge that love is there, like new batteries in the flashlight in the emergency kit in the hall closet.

Books are slow, books are quiet. The Internet is fast and loud.

I see myself as someone who makes things. Definitions have never done anything but constrain.

If it weren't my life, I wouldn't have believed it.

Succotash my cocker spaniel, you fudging crevasse-hole dipshiitake!

Just about every children's book in my local bookstore has an animal for its hero. But then, only a few feet away in the cookbook section, just about every cookbook includes recipes for cooking animals. Is there a more illuminating illustration of our paradoxical relationship with the nonhuman world?

I have no need for the past, I thought, like a child. I did not consider that the past might have a need for me.