Bureaucrats – monkeys who hear no evil and see no evil – are first in line for promotion.

With the Regional Office breathing down her neck... Corinne had wanted to keep the Drury case low-key, uncontroversial. since Craig’s disappearance had set he alarm bells off, Anna was willing to be she’d change tactics, make a noisy show of taking command of the situation. For a while the name of the game at Guadalupe Mountains would be Cover Your Ass.

Whoever had come up with the chant “Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me” had been an idiot.

In a world that is becoming increasingly virtual, the parks remain places of visceral beauty. Places where we can remember that we are but a small part of the life on this planet, and that it is a truly wonderful planet and the only one we’ve got.

Part of her soul... gloried in the sheer bodacious unnaturalness of it. Putting a great blue-green water park smack down in the red desert complete with cactus, trading posts, genuine Navajo Indians, and five kinds of rattlesnakes was theater of the absurd at its most outrageous.

She was forty before she realized that when she asked a man what he was thinking and he said, “Nothing,” he wasn’t lying.

For a while they sat without talking. Anna got her daypack and dug out a paperback copy of Ivanhoe. It produced a book’s inevitable effect. In cats it stimulated the urge to sit on the pages. In humans it stimulated conversation.

One cannot be kind in any meaningful way over any length of time without also being good.

We are one another’s angels.

Dose it ever amaze and delight you that of all the places in the world – cold grassy nests under hedgerows, warm patches of sun on a carpet – the cat chooses to sit on your lap?