They are all beasts of burden in a sense, ' Thoreau once remarked of animals, 'made to carry some portion of our thoughts.' Animals are the old language of the imagination; one of the ten thousand tragedies of their disappearance would be a silencing of this speech.

Every walker is a guard on patrol to protect the ineffable.

Walking . . . is how the body measures itself against the earth.

...the gym is a kind of wildlife preserve for bodily exertion. A preserve protects species whose habitat is vanishing elsewhere, and the gym (and home gym) accommodates the survival of bodies after the abandonment of the original sites of bodily exertion.

For me, being in a car or on an airplane is like being in limbo. It's this dead zone between two places. But to walk, you're some place that's already interesting. You're not just between places. Things are happening.

For me, before I learned how to read I was really interested in story and in landscape and nature. I decided to become a writer almost as soon as I learned to read.

People rescue each other. They build shelters and community kitchens and ways to deal with lost children and eventually rebuild one way or another.