Anything that’s good you always want to own yourself, to be able to have it and see it again and again. That is, until you really think about it. It’s taken me a long time to learn that anything marvelous—all those things that produce an emotion in your throat—why, I own those things already. The eyes take title and the mind possesses. That’s not just writer’s rhetoric. The act of appreciation doesn’t constitute legal ownership, but nevertheless it embodies the knowledge that a human being is composed of all the things that he has seen and known and loved.

—Al Purdy