And yet it disturbs me to learn I have hurt someone unintentionally. I want all my hurts to be intentional.
No mother is ever, completely, a child’s idea of what a mother should be, and I suppose it works the other way around as well. But despite everything, we didn’t do too badly by one another, we did as well as most.
There’s something final about saying you were married once. It’s like saying you were dead once. It shuts them up.
The fabric of democracy is always fragile everywhere because it depends on the will of citizens to protect it, and when they become scared, when it becomes dangerous for them to defend it, it can go very quickly.
Sometimes reactions can be quite surprising: readers like things that you, the author, feel you’ve barely gotten away with; or they dislike one of the parts you secretly think is one of your little gems.
Our biggest technology that we ever, ever invented was articulated language with built-out grammar. It is that that allows us to imagine things far in the future and things way back in the past.
In the desert there is no sign that says, Thou shalt not eat stones.
Paper isn’t important. It’s the words on them that are important.
Publishing a book is like stuffing a note into a bottle and hurling it into the sea.
We are silent, considering shortfalls. There’s not much time left, for us to become what we once intended. Jon had potential, but it’s not a word that can be used comfortably any more. Potential has a shelf-life.
Maybe I don’t really want to know what’s going on. Maybe I’d rather not know. Maybe I couldn’t bear to know. The Fall was a fall from innocence to knowledge.
At the very least we want a witness. We can’t stand the idea of our own voices falling silent finally, like a radio running down.
I grew up with the biologists. I know how they think.
Sooner or later, I hate to break it to you, you’re gonna die, so how do you fill in the space between here and there? It’s yours. Seize your space.
We pulled the seeds out and scattered them on their flossy parachutes, leaving only the leathery brownish yellow tongue, soft as the inside of an elbow.
The animals have no need for speech, why talk when you are a word.
His father was self-made, but his mother was constructed by others, and such edifices are notoriously fragile.
The bell that measures time is ringing.
I didn’t much like it, this grudge-holding against the past.
Optimism means better than reality; pessimism means worse than reality. I’m a realist.