People's dreams are made out of what they do all day. The same way a dog that runs after rabbits will dream of rabbits. It's what you do that makes your soul, not the other way around.

My life is a pitiful, mechanical thing without a past, like a little wind-up car, ready to run in any direction someone points me.

Hope is a renewable option: If you run out of it at the end of the day, you get to start over in the morning.

In the long run, most of us spend about fifteen minutes total in the entanglements of passion, and the rest of our days looking back on it, humming the tune.

Arguments could fill a marriage like water, running through everything, always, with no taste or color but lots of noise.

What life can I live that will let me breathe in and out and love somebody or something and not run off screaming into the woods?

... Urban friends ask me how I can stand living here, 'so far from everything?' When I hear this question over the phone, I'm usually looking out the window at a forest, a running creek, and a vegetable garden, thinking: Define everything.