Books Are Solitudes In Which We Meet.

There Is No One As Dangerous As He Or She Who Has Nothing To Lose.

The Object We Call A Book Is Not The Real Book, But Its Potential, Like A Musical Score Or Seed. It Exists Fully Only In The Act Of Being Read; And Its Real Home Is Inside The Head Of The Reader, Where The Symphony Resounds, The Seed Germinates. A Book Is A Heart That Only Beats In The Chest Of Another.

A Place Is A Story, And Stories Are Geography, And Empathy Is First Of All An Act Of Imagination, A Storyteller's Art, And Then A Way Of Traveling From Here To There.

The Language Of Commerce Has Been Engineered To Describe The Overt Purpose Of A Thing, But Cannot Encompass Fringe Benefits Or Peripheral Pleasures. It Weighs The Obvious Against What In Its Terms Are Incomprehensible. When I Drive From Here To There, Speed, Privacy, Control, And Safety Are Easy To Claim. When I Walk, What Happens Is More Vague, More Ambiguous-and In Many Circumstances Much Richer. I Am Out In The World. It's Exercise, Though Not So Quantifiably As On A Treadmill In A Gym With A Digital Readout.

For Millions Of Years, This World Has Been A Great Gift To Nearly Everything Living On It, A Planet Whose Atmosphere, Temperature, Air, Water, Seasons, And Weather Were Precisely Calibrated To Allow Us - The Big Us, Including Forests And Oceans, Species Large And Small - To Flourish.