When your income passes a certain point you lose touch. All of a sudden the other people look like geeks or gooks, expendables. - Ross Macdonald

The moral beatings that people took from their children, I was thinking, were the hardest to endure and the hardest to escape.

They had jerrybuilt the beaches from San Diego to the Golden Gate, bulldozed super-highways through mountains, cut down a thousand year of redwood growth, and built an urban wilderness in the desert. They couldn't touch the ocean. They poured their sewage into it, but it couldn't be tainted.

We went inside and I kissed her. Not only my temperature rose.