Life and death matters, yes. And the question of how to behave in this world, how to go in the face of everything. Time is short and the water is rising.

The places where water comes together with other water. Those places stand out in my mind like holy places.

When a reader finishes a wonderful story and lays it aside, he should have to pause for a minute and collect himself.

Every great or even every very good writer makes the world over according to his own specifications.

Ralph also took some classes in philosophy and literature and felt himself on the brink of some kind of huge discovery about himself. But it never came.

That was in Crescent City, California, up near the Oregon border. I left soon after. But today I was thinking of that place, of Crescent City, and of how I was trying out a new life there with my wife, and how, in the barber's chair that morning, I had made up my mind to go. I was thinking today about the calm I felt when I closed my eyes and let the barber's fingers move through my hair, the sweetness of those fingers, the hair already starting to grow.

and did you get what you wanted from this life even so? i did.