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.

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.

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.

We tell stories to talk out the trouble in our lives, trouble otherwise so often so unspeakable. It is one of our main ways of making our lives sensible. Trying to live without stories can make us crazy. They help us recognize what we believe to be most valuable in the world, and help us identify what we hold demonic.

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