A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.

One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves. The very working of this economic system, which has bestowed these unprecedented liberties, most cherished in the form of physical mobility and material prosperity, depends on encouraging people to defy limits.

Even more than comparing society to a family, comparing it to a body makes an authoritarian ordering of society seem inevitable, immutable.

God, living is enormous!

... the place we assign to pornography depends on the goals we set for our own consciousness, our own experience.

Nature in America has always been suspect, on the defensive, cannibalized by progress. In America, every specimen becomes a relic.

But when we are nostalgic, we take pictures