When I select a topic, it's usually a commitment of two to three years of my life

Things were here before you and will be here after you're gone. The geographic features, especially, give you a sense of your own place in the world and in time

Public education rests precariously on the skill and virtue of the people at the bottom of the institutional pyramid.

I think if the writing comes too easily, it shows - it's usually hard to read.

Writing is revision. All prose responds to work.

In order to go on with our lives, we are always capable of making the ominous into the merely strange.

How could a just God permit great misery? The Haitian peasants answered with a proverb: "Bondye konn bay, men li pa konn separe," in literal translation, "God gives but doesn't share." This meant... God gives us humans everything we need to flourish, but he's not the one who's supposed to divvy up the loot. That charge was laid upon us.