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" There will always be vain, obsessive people who want to own rare and extraordinary things whatever the cost; there will always be people for whom owning beautiful, dangerous animals brings a sense of power and magic. "

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" I want to let my friend Buster know that I would like to have dinner with him tonight. Does Buster work at home? Then how likely is he to have his cell phone on? Is he one of those people who only turns on his cell when he's in his car? I hate that. "

Susan Orlean

Home

Work

Car

" They will be given as gifts; books that are especially pretty or visual will be bought as hard copies; books that are collectible will continue to be collected; people with lots of bookshelves will keep stocking them; and anyone who likes to make notes in books will keep buying books with margins to fill. "

" I remember three- and four-week-long snow days, and drifts so deep a small child, namely me, could get lost in them. No such winter exists in the record, but that's how Ohio winters seemed to me when I was little - silent, silver, endless, and dreamy. "

Susan Orlean

Child

Deep

" When it comes to consumer electronics, I'm a big fat sucker, because even though I know you should never, ever buy anything until the second version of it is released, I just can't resist. I live in a state of perpetual Beta. "

" There are cultures that believe having your photograph taken steals your soul. I don't think there is a stolen soul in a picture, but still - why is it so hard to throw them away? "

" Election Day outside of big cities is different. For one thing, there are so few people in my town that each individual vote really does matter, and several local races have been decided by as many votes as you can count on one hand. "

" I have worked on PCs and on Macs and, while I have my preferences, I don't find it crippling to work on one rather than the other. "

" I love writing traditional magazine pieces, and especially their breadth of reporting and the deliberateness of the writing. "

" I heard a computer scientist the other day refer to playing with the Kinect as 'storytelling.' At first I thought that sounded a little high-minded, but after trying a few games I could see what she meant. "

" I love tearing things out of the ground. I love digging and discarding. I love pruning. In fact, I love pruning so much that I once gave myself carpal-tunnel syndrome because I attacked a trumpet vine with so much dedication. "

" I've tried a lot of different apps to manage Twitter on my phone (I use Hootsuite on my laptop), but I think the official Twitter app is really good. "

" Buying a car used to be an experience so soul-scorching, so confidence-splattering, so existentially rattling that an entire car company was based on the promise that you wouldn't have to come in contact with it. "

" Sense of smell, of course, is only one of those dog qualities that can't be replicated or improved upon. I've been researching dogs in warfare for my book about 'Rin Tin Tin,' and I've read many accounts of their heroics: carrying messages through battle, alerting troops to enemy planes, and even parachuting behind enemy lines. "

" I was never any good at remembering dates, but now I hardly have to. When the first bulb catalogs get delivered and the hens start laying again, that's all the notice I'll need to know that winter has passed. "

" I am unusually Halloween-attentive, because, as it happens, I was born on Halloween, so for me it has always been an occasion of great moment. "

" Borders had lousy management and made bad corporate decisions, so its fate is less like a terrible accident than a slow-motion slide into a ditch, but it's hard to be happy about a bookseller's demise. "

" I wish I had coined the phrase 'tyranny of choice,' but someone beat me to it. The counterintuitive truth is that have an abundance of options does not make you feel privileged and indulged; too many options make you feel like all of them are wrong, and that you are wrong if you choose any of them. "

Susan Orlean

You

Choice

" I once had a boyfriend who couldn't write unless he was wearing a necktie and a dress shirt, which I thought was really weird, because this was a long time ago, and no one I knew ever wore dress shirts, let alone neckties; it was like he was a grown-up reenacter or something. "

" You could go crazy thinking of how unprivate our lives really are - the omnipresent security cameras, the tracking data on our very smart phones, the porous state of our Internet selves, the trail of electronic crumbs we leave every day. "

" I can imagine a future in which real books will exist but in a more limited, particular way. "

" I work at home, in the country, and days will go by when, except for my husband and son and the occasional UPS man, the only sentient creatures that see me are my chickens and turkeys. "

Susan Orlean

Home

Husband

" When I was a kid, phone calls were a premium commodity; only the very coolest kids had a phone line of their own, and long-distance phone calls were made after eleven, when the rates went down, unless you were flamboyant with your spending. Then phone calls became as cheap as dirt and as constant as rain, and I was on the phone all the time. "

" We do a lot of bird-watching up in the country, but we almost never have a chance to people-watch. There simply aren't enough human beings up here: there is nowhere you can park yourself with a cup of coffee and observe the species on parade. "

" 'Brave' is one of those words that has been bleached of most of its meaning these days, thanks to far too many appearances in the glaring light of ad slogans and corporate public relations. I never thought about anything as brave anymore; it just seemed like a flabby, glib cliche. "

" When I was a kid, Halloween was strictly a starchy-vegetable-only holiday, with pumpkins and Indian corn on the front stoop; there was nothing electric, nothing inflatable, nothing with latex membranes or strobes. "

" I had never considered using a hashtag anywhere other than on Twitter, but now I'm inspired. Text messages have always seemed a little flat to me, so the murmuring Greek chorus of a hashtag might be a perfect way to liven them up and give them a bit of dimension. "

Susan Orlean

Always

Never

" Even after I'd published three books and had been writing full-time for twenty years, my father continued to urge me to go to law school. "

" I remember, when I was a kid, watching my mother jam herself into her girdle - a piece of equipment so rigid it could stand up on its own - and I remember her coming home from fancy parties and racing upstairs to extricate herself from its cruel iron grip. "

" In my perfect world, we would establish perhaps four national zoos of unimpeachable quality and close the rest of them. "

" You can find out anything you want about a car now, and especially every bit of information about the price, without relying on the dealers. "