Shel’s Reviews > The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year > Status Update

“Because sometimes the only cure for homesickness is to enlarge the definition of home.”

"In the green morning / I wanted to be a heart. / A heart." Federico Garcia Lorca, "Ditty of First Desire"

"Apocalyptic stories always get the apocalypse wrong. The tragedy is not the failed world's barren ugliness. Te tragedy is its clinging beauty even as it fails. Until the very last cricket falls silent, the beauty-besotted will find a reason to love the world."

"The world will always be beautiful to those who look for beauty."

"The future no longer spreads out before me like an endless opportunity, like a sensible vessel for any plans I might conceive."

"We are creatures built for joy. At the very saddest of funerals, we can hear a funny story about our lost beloved, and, God help us, we laugh. We can stagger out of an appointment where a person in a white coat has given us news we think we cannot bear to hear, and still we smile at the baby in the checkout line...This is who we are the very best of who we are."

Very pretty book. "For him there is an entire world that exists beyond my ken, and in this matter he is not unique. For every living thing, there is a world that exists beyond my ken." --Praise Song for the Dog's Marvelous Nose