"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 …"

"They were good-looking, too—not in the plastic Hollywood sense, but with the healthy good looks of active young women…"

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

"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…"