What keeps me awake at the wheel is the thrill of trying something completely new with each book. I’m not a risk-taker in life, generally speaking, but as a writer I definitely choose the fast car, the impossible rock face, the free fall.
Nothing to do with nature, unless you count human nature.
We agreed with him in principal – we were little scientists, born and bred. But children robbed of love will dwell on magic.
What a writer can do, what a fiction writer or a poet or an essay writer can do is re-engage people with their own humanity.
Our plans are small and somewhat absurd.
Pure and unblemished souls must taste very bland, with an aftertaste of bitterness.
Downstream is always someone else’s up.
My worst nightmare is being stuck somewhere with nothing to read.
The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for!
For scientists, reality is not optional.
Everyone should get dirt on his hands each day. Doctors, intellectuals. Politicians, most of all. How can we presume to uplift the life of the working man, if we don’t respect his work?
They all attended Hester’s church, which Dellarobia viewed as a complicated pyramid scheme of moral debt and credit resting ultimately on the shoulders of the Lord, but rife with middle managers.
Science doesn’t tell us what we should do. It only tells us what is.
Time cures you first, and then it kills you.
You know things are bad when a woman without any legs and who recently lost two of her own kids feels sorry for you.
People love to read about sins and errors, but not their own.
People read books to escape the uncertainties of life.
It’s one thing to carry your life wherever you go. Another thing to always go looking for it somewhere else.
A careless way of sauntering across the earth and breaking open its treasures, a terrible dependency on sucking out the world’s best juices for ourselves-these may also be our enemies. The changes we dread most may contain our salvation.
No kind of bomb ever built will extinguish hatred.