“I deserve a swift kick in the shorts for all the times I've stubbornly wound my way through the library stacks, my mule head leading the way, searching fruitlessly for information a librarian could put in my hands in a matter of minutes.”

“It isn't just the idea of a woman in a truck. At this point, they're everywhere. The statisticians tell us today's woman is as likely to buy a truck as a minivan. One cheers the suffrage, but the effect is dilutive. My head doesn't snap around the way it used to. Ignoring for the moment that my head (or the gray hairs upon it) may be the problem, I think it's not about women in trucks, it's about certain women in certain trucks. Not so long ago I was fueling my lame tan sedan at the Gas-N-Go when a woman roared across the lot in a dusty pickup and pulled up to park by the yellow cage in which they lock up the LP bottles. She dismounted wearing scuffed boots and dirty jeans and a T-shirt that was overwashed and faded, and at the very sight of her I made an involuntary noise that went, approximately, ohf...! I suppose ohf...! reflects as poorly on my character as wolf whistle, but I swear it escaped without premeditation. Strictly a spinal reflex. [...] The woman plucking her eyebrows in the vanity mirror of her waxed F-150 Lariat does not elicit the reflex. Even less so if her payload includes soccer gear or nothing at all. That woman at the Gas-N-Go? I checked the back of her truck. Hay bales and a coon dog crate. Ohf...!”

“It’s hard to talk about guns without sounding defensive or blustery. I’m pro-gun the same way I’m pro-potato fork. I use them both to gather food for the year, with the caveat that if you break into my house, I won’t be waiting for yo at the top of the stairs with a potato fork.”

“It is the blessing of dumb work done close to the earth-one gritty minute at a time, we move forward.”

“From the get-go, my hair was programmed to fall out. One is grateful this so rarely happens with the pancreas or the eyeballs.”

“If you had gone around the table last night ticking off the Ten Commandments and asking for a show of hands to indicate transgression, you would have thought we were doing the wave. A gloss of the New Testament rules and you would have heard the rotator cuffs snapping. But if you had asked a simpler question -- "Who among you is proud of this?" -- I think you would have seen no hands, and this is what I love about that crew. Chipped and profane, they have taught me that there is a certain vocabulary you learn only through attrition and heartache.”

“[Fire] is lightfooted and shamanic, dancing between the visible and invisible, undoing matter one collapsed molecule at a time, wreaking utter destruction with a touch softer than breath. Its poor cousins, wind and water, are one-dimensional rubes by comparison. Wind is all push, push, push. Water is suffocating, but passively so. And even when water gets it together to be a torrent or a tsunami, it is but wet wind. Fire is at once elemental and otherworldly. Fire dances on the grave of all it destroys. Fire is serious voodoo.”