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High Alpine meadows, like their near relatives prairie, desert and certain varieties of wetland, teach us to consider the world from a fresh perspective, to open our eyes and take account of what we have missed, reminding us that, in spite of our emphasis on the visual in everyday speech, we see so very little of the world.

Names, once they are in common use, quickly become mere sounds, their etymology being buried, like so many of the earth's marvels, beneath the dust of habit.

Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a realm beyond words.

There's a whole range of words that people use about landscape. Pastoral? Idyll? I can't stand them.

The life of our city is rich in poetic and marvelous subjects. We are enveloped and steeped as though in an atmosphere of the marvelous; but we do not notice it.

Words are like untying a corset - you can move into this great space with them.

If geography is prose, maps are iconography.

A sense of place is very important in writing.

I've named a couple things after Edgar Allan Poe: the cat, and my garden upstate, where I only planted black flowers and purple flowers - and there's a raven statue.