It was possible, he understood, for a person's life to become just a long series of mistakes, and that the end, when it came, was just one more mistake in a chain of bad choices. The thing was, most of these mistakes were actually borrowed from other people. You took their bad ideas, and for whatever reason, made them your own.

One thing that worried me was how writers get categorized and so they end up having to write the same kind of book again and again. That is fine if it is what you want to do, but I would rather be locked in the trunk of my car with a weasel than write the same book every three years until I die.

The world was a world of dreaming souls who could not die.

The fact is, there's a great deal of hair-splitting fussiness when it comes to fly-fishing, most of it as silly as a top hat.

It happened fast. Thirty-two minutes for one world to die, another to be born.

A baby was a fact. It was a being with a mind and a nature, and you could feel about it any way you liked, but a baby wouldn't care. Just by existing, it demanded that you believe in a future: the future it would crawl in, walk in, live in. A baby was a piece of time; it was a promise you made that the world made back to you.

Miles away from everthing and everyone I've ever known or loved. I feel as if I've entered a new era of my life. What strange places our lives carry us to.