We live in stories. What we are is stories. We do things because of what is called character, and our character is formed by the stories we learn to live in.

A man ... needs to get out in the open air and sweat and blow off the stink.

It is a skill we learn early, the art of inventing stories to explain away the fearful scared strangeness of the world. Storytelling and make-believe, like war and agriculture, are among the arts of self-defense, and all of them are ways of enclosing otherness and claiming ownership.

One of finest evocations of life in Western America in recent memory... Powerful and profoundly moving.

In learning to pay respectful attention to one another and plants and animals, we relearn the acts of empathy, and thus humility and compassion - ways of proceeding that grow more and more necessary as the world crowds in.

I had discovered a terrible vulnerability I myself which I think of not as cowardliness but as an ability to imagine too much.

Don't worry about meaning. If a story's any good, it can't help but have meaning. Let the PhDs tell you what your story means.