Look! cried Olson. Would you look at the giraffe comin' up out o' the bottom of the say? We looked in the direction he pointed and saw a long, glossy neck surmounted by a small head rising above the surface of the river. Presently the back of the creature was exposed, brown and glossy as the water dripped from it. It turned its eyes upon us, opened its lizard-like mouth, emitted a shrill hiss and came for us. The thing must have been sixteen or eighteen feet in length and closely resembled pictures I had seen of restored plesiosaurs of the lower Jurassic.

Influenced by reading the work of poets including Walt Whitman and Robinson Jeffers, he decided that 'poetry is the shortest, sweetest, bangingest way' to express what he wanted to say.

Your criticism will seem like flyspecking. They'll be mad at you for pointing out that there's more crime than they like to think, and especially mad that you're saying their own group—privileged middle-aged white males—are just as bad as young African-American inner-city toughs, walking the streets in packs of four and looking mean.

the great rapidity , with which the wheels that serve to cut and polish diamonds must be moved , excites a great degree of heat in the stone ; whereby , perhaps , it loses its exhalable matter so plentifully