“Southern California is a landscape of edges and contradictions set upon by a variegated human population that at times seems hell bent to leave its destructive footprints from desert to ocean, mountain to flat coastal plain. I have discovered that the sharp divisions and false syntheses of this place reflect the inconsistencies and unexplored edges in my personality, and that as much as I might have longed to live quietly in some less densely populated place, this would never do...When I settled in Malibu I discovered the strong pull of place and began to incorporate landscape as a dominant character in my writing.”

“This is important to writing. . . that is, it is important to my own writing. This. . . is landscape! Mine. This dirt came from the prairie where I was a child. I played in it, dug in it, planted in it, and walked over it. It is where I began. And all my writing begins with a landscape such as this. A place.”

“We stick to the magical places in the world,” Asahi clarified.“Places like the MBRC, the Redwood forest of California, the less populated parts of New Zealand and Japan, Disney World, and Atlantis,” Madeline listed, ticking the places off on her fingers.“Wait, Disney World?” I interrupted.“The most magical place on Earth.”

“I wondered about the explorers who'd sailed their ships to the end of the world. How terrified they must have been when they risked falling over the edge; how amazed to discover, instead, places they had seen only in their dreams.”

“...by bringing myself over the edge and back, I discovered a passion to live my days fully, a conviction that will sustain me like sweet water on the periodically barren plain of our short lives.”

“The deep ecologists warn us not to be anthropocentric, but I know no way to look at the world, settled or wild, except through my own human eyes. I know that is wasn't created especially for my use, and I share the guilt for what members of my species, especially the migratory ones, have done to it. But I am the only instrument that I have access to by which I can enjoy the world and try to understand it. So I must believe that, at least to human perception, a place is not a place until people have been born in it, have grown up in it, have lived in it, known it, died in it--have both experienced and shaped it, as individuals, families, neighborhoods, and communities, over more than one generation. Some are born in their place, some find it, some realize after long searching that the place they left is the one they have been searching for. But whatever their relation to it, it is made a place only by slow accrual, like a coral reef.”