“I watch the Eruptions. Mount Dad, long dormant, now considered armed and dangerous. Mount Saint Mom, oozing lava, spitting flame. Warn the villagers to run into the sea.”

“But when I am around strangers, I turn into a conversational Mount St. Helens. I'm dormant, dormant, quiet, quiet, old-guy loners build log cabins on the slopes of my silence and then, boom, it's 1980. Once I erupt, they'll be wiping my verbal ashes off their windshields as far away as North Dakota.”

“.. now i begin to feel a longing so great, so sharp, i fear it will never be assuaged. i think it will mount, and mount, and make me mad, or kill me.”

“Would that, like the smoke of the watch-fires that mounts and vanishes at random in the empty sky, the smouldering flame of passion could burn itself away”

“Mount Kilauea spilled glowing lava like cords of orange neon-lighting from seemingly nowhere. In the blackness that engulfed the night, electric heat lit flowing streams that fell into the sea, disappearing in a cloud of steam with a sizzling splash.”

“Super-eruption of mount Toba, 76,000 years ago had wiped out a previous great civilization on earth.”