What does it mean when what you have becomes equal to what you do, when what you own is essential to who you are? In our everyday grasp of owning things, we tag it materialism, consumerism, consumption. But I trust you’ll agree that the possession of books is not identical to the possession of shoes. Someone with thousands of books is someone you want to talk to; someone with thousands of shoes is someone you suspect of soul-death.

Haunted and bereft, he learned then, were an unforgiving pair.

Because he was beginning to fear that man belongs neither in civilization nor nature – because we are aberrations between two states of being.

You can always blame a person. The world ain’t nothing but persons, every goddamn one of them starved for something.

The annals of human wisdom fall silent when faced with the feral in us.

Please quiet your strange self lest harm come to you.

A wolf expelled from its pack will travel hard distances to find another – to be accepted, to have kin. It wants to stanch hunger, sleep off fatigue, make itself anew.

Of course George Orwell was not a saint – he could be unfaithful to his wife and suspicious of democracy, for starters – and it’s a good thing, too, because saints are always hard to take seriously.

Most writers deserve the reputation posterity has bestowed upon them: You can’t for long conceal the toxic spots on your character – Philip Larkin is Exhibit A – nor can you conceal your dignity, your humanism, your regard for veracity and freedom.

Why is this happening to me, Mr. Core? What myth has come true in my house?” “They’re just hungry wolves, Mrs. Slone. It’s no myth. It’s just hunger. No one’s cursed. Wolves will take kids if they need to. This is simple biology here. Simple nature.” He wanted to say: All myths are true. Every one is the only truth we have.