There aren’t many irritations to match the condescension which a woman metes out to a man who she believes has loved her vainly for the past umpteen years.

Animals are stylized characters in a kind of old saga – stylized because even the most acute of them have little leeway as they play out their parts.

There were periods during my childhood when I stammered so badly I couldn’t talk at all.

If a person sings quietly to himself on the street people smile with approval; but if he talks it’s not alright; they think he’s crazy. The singer is presumed to be happy and the talker unhappy...

The question of whether it’s God’s green earth is not at center stage, except in the sense that if so, one is reminded with some regularity that He may be dying.

She – the unnamed lady – simply drew his hands to the Paleolithic places men always have grown tumid from feeling, like the outward cradle of the hips within which a fetus will reside and her breasts that will nourish it, once born.

It’s incongruous that the older we get, the more likely we are to turn in the direction of religion. Less vivid and intense ourselves, closer to the grave, we begin to conceive of ourselves as immortal.

Black bears, though, are not fearsome. I encountered one on the road to my house in Vermont, alone at night. I picked up two stones just in case, but I wasn’t afraid of him. I felt a hunter’s exhilaration and a brotherly feeling.

Silence is exhilarating at first – as noise is – but there is a sweetness to silence outlasting exhilaration, akin to the sweetness of listening and the velvet of sleep.

A writer’s work is to witness things.