“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...”

“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...”

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

“He dug so deeply into her sentiments that in search of interest he found love, because by trying to make her love him he ended up falling in love with her. Petra Cotes, for her part, loved him more...”

“When what you want is a relationship, and not a person, get a dog.”

“When we cannot bear to be alone, it means we do not properly value the only companion we will have from birth to death - ourselves.”

“Smiling at someone can have significant health consequences.”

“You're not free unless you come to the place where you have nothing to prove.”

“A man who has HEALTH has a thousand dreams, but a man without HEALTH has only one.”

“Today I want to belong. I want to feel safe and at home. I want to be aware of what it is like simply to be, without defenses or desires. I will appreciate the flow of life for what it is-my own tr...”

“Nature reflects the moods of the wizard.”

“My calling ties me to no office, makes me no man's slave, compels me to no action which my soul condemns. It sets me free from town life, which I loathe; and allows me to breathe clean air, to exer...”