I like being in a country where when cows attack, word of it gets around. That’s what I mean when I say Britain is cozy.
What sets the carbon atom apart is that it is shamelessly promiscuous.
The older you get the more it seems the world belongs to other people.
You can get some sense of the immaterial quality of clouds by strolling through fog – which is, after all, nothing more than a cloud that lacks the will to fly.
Make no mistake. This is a planet of microbes. We are here at their pleasure. They don’t need us at all. We’d be dead in a day without them.
Survival on Earth is a surprisingly tricky business. Of the billions and billions of species of living thing that have existed since the dawn of time, most – 99.99 percent – are no longer around. Life on Earth, you see, is not only brief but dismayingly tenuous. It is a curious feature of our existence that we come from a planet that is very good at promoting life but even better at extinguishing it.
Perhaps nothing speaks more eloquently of the variability of spelling in the age than the fact that a dictionary published in 1604, A Table Alphabeticall of Hard Words, spelled “words” two ways on the title page.
I love to watch cities wake up, and Paris wakes up more abruptly, more startlingly, than any place I know.
I love a sunburnt country, A land of sweeping plains, Of ragged mountain ranges, Of droughts and flooding rains.
The pleasant fact is that the British are not much good at violent crime except in fiction, which is of course as it should be.
According to Time Out magazine, at any given moment there are 600,000 people on the Underground, making it both a larger and more interesting place than Oslo.
When you write books for a living, you come to realize that while not all people who write to authors are strange, all people who are strange write to authors.
The Forest Service is truly an extraordinary institution. A lot of people, seeing that word forest in the title, assume it has something to do with looking after trees. In fact, no – though that was the original plan.
Everyone has a supremely low moment somewhere along the AT, usually when the urge to quit the trail becomes almost overpowering. The irony of my moment was that I wanted to get back on the trail and didn’t know how. I hadn’t lost just Katz, my boon companion, but my whole sense of connectedness to the trail. I had lost my momentum, my feeling of purpose. In the most literal way I needed to find my feet again.
How do migrating birds know which one to follow? What if the lead bird just wants to be alone?
Second, you are alive. For the tiniest moment in the span of eternity you have the miraculous privilege to exist.
Just because a word or expression has an antiquity or was once widely used does not confer on it some special immunity.
It sometimes occurs to me that the British have more heritage than is good for them. In a country where there is so astonishingly much of everything, it is easy to look on it as a kind of inexhaustible resource.
Nothing gives the English more pleasure, in a quiet but determined sort of way, than to do things oddly.
Eenie, meenie, minie, mo” is based on a counting system that predates the Roman occupation of Britain, that may even be pre-Celtic. If so, it is a rare surviving link with the very distant past. It not only gives us a fragmentary image of how children were being amused at the time Stonehenge was built, but tells us something about how their elders counted and thought and ordered their speech.