“Time, you discover, has wrought changes that leave you feeling mildly foolish and out of touch.”

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.

It sometimes occurs to me that the British have more heritage than isgood for them.

I do find London exciting. Much as I hate to agree with that tedious old git Samuel Johnson, and despite the pompous imbecility of his famous remark about when a man is tired of London he is tired of life…I can’t dispute it.

There is more difference between a zebra and a horse, or between a dolphin and a porpoise, than there is between you and the furry creatures your distant ancestors left behind when they set out to take over the world.

In the countryside, litter doesn’t have a friend. It doesn’t have anybody who’s saying, ‘Wait a minute, this is really starting to get out of control.’

I want those forehead to forehead moments with eyes closed deeply. So deeply that the world disappears and every scent of you leaves an imprint on my mind.

We leave something of ourselves behind when we leave a place, but we find things in us we didn’t even know existed.

I became fluent in all their leaving i became in all the grieving.

If you’re with me, I’Il get used to it. If you’ll leave me I’ll get used to it. Choose wisely!

I wonder, what will you tell your children was the reason to fail and leave them facing the climate chaos you knowingly brought upon them?

Toil and risk are the price of glory, but it is a lovely thing to live with courage and die leaving an everlasting fame.

I became your melancholy your unfinished symphony its better to leave undone rather than knowing I did my best yet wasn’t enough.

I want you to be the one I stay in bed with on sunday morning, and never want to leave.