There were people you could hug, and then there was Silas.

Be boring, knowing everything. You have to give all that stuff up if you're going to muck about here.

Really, he thought, if you couldn't trust a poet to offer sensible advice, who could you trust?

For some folks death is release, and for others death is an abomination, a terrible thing. But in the end, I'm there for all of them.

And did I pass?" The face of the old woman on my right was unreadable in the gathering dusk. On my left the younger woman said, "You don't pass or fail at being a person, dear.

Adults follow paths. Children explore. Adults are content to walk the same way, hundreds of times, or thousands; perhaps it never occurs to adults to step off the paths, to creep beneath rhododendrons, to find the spaces between fences. I was a child, which meant that I knew a dozen different ways of getting out of our property and into the lane, ways that would not involve walking down our drive.

He sighed. It was a long sigh, weary and worldly-wise. The kind of sigh you could picture God heaving after six days of hard work and looking forward to some serious cosmic R&R, only to be handed a report by an angel concerning a problem with someone eating an apple.