If sorrow and beauty are all tied up together, then perhaps maturity brings with it not what Nabhan calls abstraction, but an aesthetic sense that partially redeems the losses time brings and finds beauty in the faraway.

Never turn down an adventure without a really good reason.

A lot of people think of political activism as some grim duty, and I think we do have an obligation to be citizens - to be informed and engaged.

I don't think my work has to be loved by everyone, and it's loved by enough people that I'm grateful and able to keep going.

Some things we have only as long as they remain lost, some things are not lost only so long as they are distant.

No one is born a writer; literacy is a peculiar mode of being, but I was all about stories from a very early age, before reading.

What gets called 'the sixties' left a mixed legacy and a lot of divides. But it opened everything to question, and what seems the most fundamental and most pervasive in all the ensuing changes is the loss of faith in authority: the authority of government, of science, of patriarchy, of progress, of capitalism, of violence, of whiteness.