I can still see Boo sitting there on the floor, cross-legged, holding my Ken and watching my face as she tried to make me see that between my mother'sPTA and Boo's strange ways there was a middle ground that began here with my Barbie, Sab-rina,and led right to me.'She can be anything,' Boo told me, and this is what I remember most, her freckled face so solemn, as if she knew she was the first to tell me. 'And so can you.

Not that we must always partake of [God's feast] solemnly. 'God who made good laughter' forbid. It is one of the difficult and delightful subtleties of life that we must deeply acknowledge certain things to be serious and yet retain the power and will to treat them often as lightly as a game.

I only wrote prose before I met you. My musings were superfluous and serious as well. But now the words dance with me. I sing with them and we create poetry.

Every man should lose a battle in his youth, so he does not lose a war when he is old.

Sacrifice by its strictest definition takes something precious in exchange for the appeasement of a higher power. And abiding devotion to a cause that cannot be satisfied with a simple promise. Because an oath no matter how solemn asks nothing in return. While true sacrifice demands unspeakable loss.

Or winters when the sloughs were frozen over and dead and I could walk across the ice and snow between the dead cattails and see nothing but grey skies and dead things and cold.

If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing. A writer who appreciates the seriousness of writing so little that he is anxious to make people see he is formally educated, cultured or well-bred is merely a popinjay. And this too remember; a serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.