“Des Moines is a mecca of cosmopolitanism, a dynamic hub of wealth and education, where people wear three-piece suits and dark socks, often simultaneously.”

The remarkable position in which we find ourselves is that we don’t actually know what we actually know.

18th century scientists, the French in particular, seldom did things simply if an absurdly demanding alternative was available.

The world, you realize, is enormous in a way that only you and a small community of fellow hikers know. Planetary scale is your little secret.

Romans park their cars the way I would park if I had just spilled a beaker of hydrochloric acid on my lap.

Perhaps it’s my natural pessimism, but it seems that an awfully large part of travel these days is to see things while you still can.

There is no such thing, incidentally, as one kudo.

Every twenty minutes on the Appalachian Trail, Katz and I walked farther than the average American walks in a week. For 93 percent of all trips outside the home, for whatever distance or whatever purpose,

We used to build civilizations. Now we build shopping malls.

Where I grew up, in Des Moines, Iowa, there is hardly any downtown economic activity now. Everybody shops in malls – you don’t find a sense of community in malls.

This was 1990, the year that communism died in Europe and it seemed strange to me that in all the words that were written about the fall of the iron curtain, nobody anywhere lamented that it was the end of a noble experiment.

Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life’s quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment.

Christmas tree stands are the work of the devil and they want you dead.

I just use my life story as a kind of device on which to hang comic observations. It’s not my interest or instinct to tell the world anything pertinent about myself or my family.

…and it occurred to me, with the forcefulness of a thought experienced in 360 degrees, that that’s really what history mostly is: masses of people doing ordinary things.

It is a curious feature of our existance that we come from a planet that is very good at promoting life but even better at extinguishing it.

Finally, this being America, there is the constant possibility of murder.