A tree can be tempted out of its winter dormancy by a few hours of southerly sun—the readiness to believe in spring is stronger than sleep or sanity.

Even in rainier areas, where dust is less inexorable and submits to brooms and rags, it is generally detested, because dust is not organized and is therefore considered aesthetically bankrupt. Our light is not kind...

I suppose that someday, suddenly, I will be transferred to another age, for example the chivalric or the bronze. The hope is, of course, that I arrive in period dress but not resemble a contemporary...

The world, full of past sound, would be like the sky, full of past light. The world would be like the mind, for which there is no once.

Entomologists use that word ‘foul’ often when referring to the flavor of a caterpillar. They are rarely more specific than ‘foul’ or ‘tasty.’ I expect that is because they are leaving the assessment up to...

All bodies are radiant but not all radiance is visible: stars radiate visible light; planets and donkeys and couches radiate infrared waves. (If your couch is emitting visible light GET UP IMMEDIATELY!)

Living in a galaxy is like living in a neighborhood where the house down the street might have burned down four thousand years ago but you wouldn’t know it for another three thousand years.

Why should conversation always be so much more coherent than experience?

Perhaps it was smartest, after all, to collar your memories and isolate them, sedating the irascible ones, banishing the grotesques, systematizing the rest; maybe coaxing a lion into a wheeled cage on occasion and pulling...

Thus are many identities, over time, shown to be temporary alignments of components involved in a deeper allegiance.

In the year 3,000,002,012 the Andromeda Galaxy may collide with our Milky Way. At first this sounds miserable, like a collision of two bird flocks. But galaxy members fly farly, not tip to tip. In...

Thereafter were the stars persuaded to depict compasses and quadrants, stripped of their names, given numbers, all but regimented into a grid, before they had had enough and reverted to their old subjects: dogs, dragons,...

Whether people need nature or not, it was clear that nature needed people. But perhaps nature needs us like a hostage needs her captors: nature needs us not to annihilate her, not to run her...

FIREFLAKES: The stars; as transitory as snowflakes only their transitoriness is protracted.

Plants cannot stay safe. Desire for light spools grass out of the ground; desire for a visitor spools red ruffles out of twigs. Desire makes plants very brave, so they can find what they desire;...