I think as humans we do want to control our relationships, and you can't. It's probably better that you can't. That wouldn't be a real relationship, and we'd never learn and grow.

In a fire you have to be thoughtful, you have to have a certain kind of intuitive smarts that the veterans have. I'm not there yet, despite the Stanford degree.

You can never know anyone as completely as you want. But that’s okay, love is better.

Its hard in the firehouse to avoid the dessert thing. At 3 in the morning after some emergency, I have been known to eat an ice cream sandwich.

Wasn't growing catnip in one's yard the kitty equivalent of giving candy to children?

Fire taps something ancient and vital in each of us, something both snarling and reverential.

When you have cat stealers over for tea, you clean the house, buy bagels and cream cheese, and try to figure out how to trap your guests in a lie.

I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that I don't know the answer

Perhaps it's simply the dual nature of marriage, the proximity of violence and love.

My mother was a teacher. She was grooming my brother and me to be successful, accomplished people.

Goat curry and a female librarian, that's what I'm in the mood for.

Increasingly unable to create for itself a relevant body of myth, the modern imagination will ransack the treasure house of the classic.

Tis Fate that flings the dice, And as she flings Of kings makes peasants, And of peasants kings.

It used to be widely held that evil was incompatible with the existence of God: that no possible world contained both God and evil. So far as I am able tell, this thesis is no longer defended

Time spent in a casino is time given to death, a foretaste of the hour when one's flesh will be diverted to the purposes of the worm and not of the will.

There is no such thing as truth. The only thing that is actually there is your 'logically' ascertained premise, which you call truth.

The little dogs and all, Tray, Blanch, and Sweetheart-see, they bark at me.