Switters was actually quite fond of Seattle's weather, and not merely because of it's ambivalence. He liked it's subtle, muted qualities and the landscape that those qualities encouraged if not engendered: vistas that seemed to have been sketched with a sumi brush dipped in quicksilver and green tea. It was fresh, it was clean, it was gently primal, and mystically suggestive.

You know what the game of golf is, don't you? It's basketball for people who can't jump and chess for people who can't think.

…not a fighter… an adventurer. He doesn’t attack, he engages; He doesn’t defend, he expands; He doesn’t destroy, he transforms; He doesn’t reject, he explores; ….

Those who shun the whimsy of things will experience rigor mortis before death.

To the extent that this world surrenders its richness and diversity, it surrenders its poetry; to the extent that it relinquishes its capacity to surprise, it relinquishes its music; to the extent that it loses its ability to tolerate ridiculous and even dangerous exceptions, it loses its grace.

The oyster was an animal worthy of New Orleans, as mysterious and private and beautiful as the city itself. If one could accept that oysters build their houses out of their lives, one could imagine the same of New Orleans, whose houses were similarly and resolutely shuttered against an outside world that could never be trusted to show proper sensitivity toward the oozing delicacies within.

Western civilization was declining too fast for comfort, but too slowly to be very exciting.