The walls of books around him, dense with the past, formed a kind of insulation against the present world of disasters.

The walls were lined with books, many of them in foreign languages, like insulation against the immediate present.

Nothing is wrong with California that a rise in the ocean level wouldn't cure.

We writers, as we work our way deeper into our craft, learn to drop more and more personal clues. Like burglars who secretly wish to be caught, we leave our fingerprints on broken locks, our voiceprints in bugged rooms, our footprints in the wet concrete.

The smell of the sea, of kelp and fish and bitter moving water, rose stronger in my nostrils. It flooded my consciousness like an ancestral memory. The swells rose sluggishly and fell away, casting up dismal gleams between the boards of the pier. And the whole pier rose and fell in stiff and creaking mimicry, dancing its long slow dance of dissolution. I reached the end and saw no one, heard nothing but my footsteps and the creak of the beams, the slap of waves on the pilings. It was a fifteen-foot drop to the dim water. The nearest land ahead of me was Hawaii.

The Archer novels are about various kinds of brokenness.

I found myself wishing that we could live like the birds and move through nature without hurting it our ourselves.