“The light that filled my house was deep and livid, half magnolia, half rainwater. Things sat in it, dark and very still.”

“When I was an undergraduate we were told that history had ended, and we all believed it. When the Berlin Wall fell, what history was made of was over. No more Cold War. No more wars. And yet here i...”

“On the Ridgeway path, aged nine or ten, was where for the first time I realized the power a person might feel by aligning themselves to deep history. Only much later did I understand these intimati...”

“The archaeology of grief is not ordered. It is more like earth under a spade, turning up things you had forgotten. Surprising things come to light: not simply memories, but states of mind, emotions...”

“Shocking loss isn't to be shared, no matter how hard you try.”

“Nature in her green, tranquil woods heals and soothes all affliction, wrote John Muir. Earth hath no sorrows that earth cannot heal. Now I knew this for what it was: a beguiling but dangerous lie. ...”

“We are fighting now to save that endangered species-the individual.”

“The rarer they get, the fewer meanings animals can have. Eventually rarity is all they are made of. The condor is an icon of extinction. There's little else to it now but being the last of its kind...”

“David had been photographing endangered species in the Hawaiian rainforest and elsewhere for years, and his collections of photographs and Suzie's tarot cards seemed somehow related. Because specie...”

“Three hundred types of mussel, a third of the worlds total, live in the Smokies. Smokies mussels have terrific names, like purple wartyback, shiny pigtoe, and monkeyface pearlymussel. Unfortunately...”

“I think now that maybe true sweetness can only happen in limbo.”

“We're so self-important. So arrogant. Everybody's going to save something now. Save the trees, save the bees, save the whales, save the snails. And the supreme arrogance? Save the planet! Are these...”