A whole bunch of big technological shocks occurred when Asian innovations - paper, gunpowder, the stirrup, the moldboard plow and so on - came to Europe via the Silk Road.

Smartphones can relay patients' data to hospital computers in a continuous stream. Doctors can alter treatment regimens remotely, instead of making patients come in for a visit.

The embrace of a new technology by ordinary people leads inevitably to its embrace by people of malign intent.

A world with a sudden limit on air travel would be tremendously different from the one we live in now.

The human propensity is to believe that flukes of good fortune will never come to an end.

The Japanese are great at inventing complex systems of rules, and not so great at explaining those rules to foreign visitors.

The Japanese drive on the left side of the road. Most streets literally do not have names.

Japanese maps tend to come in two varieties: small, schematic, and bewildering; and large, fantastically detailed, and bewildering.

Compared with U.S. cities, Japanese cities bend over backward to help foreigners. The countryside is another matter.

And when I raised myself to look at the man who’d spoken, I had a feeling of leaving my misery behind me there on the stone wall.

My real soul...? It’s real only when it’s independent...

Love is a strange feeling! And you cannot understand what happens to you when it does happen to you.

I find that when I'm ready for something to end, I transition quickly. But when something ends before its time, I find it hard to move on.

What is all this juice and all this joy?

The bewildering success of my books continues to surprise me.

I get on the floor, and I can do things a woman a fifth my age can't do.

For me it remains an open question whether [this work] pertains to the realm of mathematics or to that of art.

The understanding of some men is clear, that of others brilliant. The former illumines its surroundings; the latter obscures them.

Music is the harmonization of opposites; the conciliation of warring elements