“When the horse gives a little, praise a lot. Love and kindness are both the method and the reward. What you give is what you get back. You must be quiet to hear them speak. Everything in sequence. Always work the horse in the same spot. It's like his desk in school. Always end on a good note. Wean the horse off treats quickly.”

“A man is granted one question when god appears before him. How much do I have," the man asked, "before I die?" Enough time," God answers "to make a difference.”

“Every day I like what and who I am less and less,” he whispered more quietly than before,“because I know you wish for a different life. And I cannot give it to you.”

“It's easy to talk to a horse if you understand his language. Horses stay the same from the day they are born until the day they die. They are only changed by the way people treat them.”

“You should fight like hell if you get attacked on the street, or in your home. The old thinking was, especially with women, submit, give in, maybe the guy will give you abreak and not kill you. Now, maybe you will get raped, butleast you'll have the satisfaction of knowing you didn'tjust lie down and take it. You don't know how many home-invasion scenes we walk in on where the people are sitting there all tied up and all dead. There'll be four, five people, a family, mayb...more "You should fight like hell if you get attacked on the street, or in your home. The old thinking was, especially with women, submit, give in, maybe the guy will give you abreak and not kill you. Now, maybe you will get raped, butleast you'll have the satisfaction of knowing you didn'tjust lie down and take it. You don't know how many home-invasion scenes we walk in on where the people are sitting there all tied up and all dead. There'll be four, five people, a family, maybe some guests: enough to put up a fight. And you know they let themselves get tied up. You just know the guys said, 'We just want to tie you up. We won't hurt you.' You'd think the people would realize — why do they want to tie us up if they don't want to hurt us? But they bought it. It always gives us a little chuckle.”

“That's what I want, that kind of recklessness where the poem is even ahead of you. It's like riding a horse that's a little too wild for you, so there's this tension between what you can do and what the horse decides it's going to do.”

“Caroline had a theory about relationships. 'You're much happier when you wait," she used to tell me. 'The ones that come to you are the only ones worth anything. It's like standing on the shore and spotting something in the water. You can splash around and try to get it, ot you can wait and see if the tide brings it in.”