"But I should have known—when the gods seem to smile, they may in fact be laughing."

"Birds are real. If I had to justify extreme birding, that would be my first defense. Even as we dash around in a mad …"

"The list total isn’t important, but the birds themselves are important. Every bird you see. So the list is just a fri…"

"You had to make the effort to have the luck."

"We were talking about the insulation of human experience. We live enclosed in artificial structures with controlled c…"

"“Come on,” I said, feeling tired and angry. “You don’t really think that. Nobody thinks that any more, do they? How c…"

"The whole thing might have been erected by a demented billionaire—which it was, I reflected, since it had been built …"

"The spark for a relationship might come for free—a look, a word. But the fuel to keep it going would always be expens…"

"It did not matter to me what country I was in. Bird-list regions, like political regions, were just human inventions.…"

"One thing was becoming obvious to me now: list-chasing was not the best way to learn birds. It had been a good way to…"