Among All Life Forms, There Are Creatures

I Remember, When I Was A Kid, Watching My Mother Jam Herself Into Her Girdle - A Piece Of Equipment So Rigid It Could Stand Up On Its Own - And I Remember Her Coming Home From Fancy Parties And Racing Upstairs To Extricate Herself From Its Cruel Iron Grip.

The World Is So Huge That People Are Always Getting Lost In It. There Are Too Many Ideas And Things And People Too Many Directions To Go. I Was Starting To Believe That The Reason It Matters To Care Passionately About Something Is That It Whittles The World Down To A More Manageable Size. It Makes The World Seem Not Huge And Empty But Full Of Possibility.

I Never Thought Very Many People In The World Were Very Much Like John Laroche, But I Realized More And More That He Was Only An Extreme, Not An Aberration - That Most People In Some Way Or Another Do Strive For Something Exceptional, Something To Pursue, Even At Their Peril, Rather Than Abide An Ordinary Life.

The Genius Of A Folk Melody Or Story Is Not The Feeling That It's Original But Quite The Opposite - The Feeling That It Has Existed All Along.

When I Still Lived In Manhattan, People-watching Was My Hobby, And I Spent Many Sunday Afternoons Eating Up The Scene From A Window Seat At A Starbucks On Broadway.