“Swamps and bogs are places of transition and wild growth, breeding grounds, experimental labs where organisms and ideas have the luxury of being out of the spotlight, where the imagination can mutate and mate, send tendrils into and out of the water.”

Caves so often symbolize rebirth. It’s a hidden space, an expected, inscrutable space. Strange things live in there – eyeless salamanders, albino fish, a prophet’s epiphanies.

In a swamp, as in meditation, you begin to glimpse how elusive, how inherently insubstantial, how fleeting our thoughts are, our identities.

Things in the margins, including humans who wander there, are often on the brink of becoming someone else, or something else, whose memory may not include the significance of old markers.

There is magic in this moist world, in how the mind lets go, slips into sleepy water, circles and nuzzles the banks of palmetto and wild iris, how it seeps across dreams, smears them into the upright world, rots the wood of treasure chests, welcomes the body home.

going into a cave might be like going inside one’s own mind, crawling around in the pitch-black, nook-and-crannied labyrinth of the human psyche.

To love a swamp, however, is to love what is muted and marginal, what exists in the shadows, what shoulders its way out of mud and scurries along the damp edges of what is most commonly praised. And sometimes its invisibility is a blessing.

Silence arrests flight, so that in its refuge, the need to flee the chaos of noise diminishes. We let the world creep closer, we drop to our knees, as if to let the heart, like a small animal, get its legs on the ground.

Hunger does not breed reform; it breeds madness and all the distemper’s that make an ordered life impossible.

I have my golden retriever now, Pontiac. He’s a career-change guide dog from Guide Dogs for the Blind.

Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage.

There can be no prestige without mystery, for familiarity breeds contempt.

The only geniuses produced by the chaos of society are those who do something about it. Chaos breeds geniuses. It offers a man something to be a genius about.

Taylor Swift is so flawless, and so unattainable, and I don’t think it’s breeding anything good in young girls.

Letting go breeds freedom.

She is a different breed of passion, she went out not with a bang but with a moan.