Ambition is an expensive impulse, one that requires an enormous investment of emotional capital. Like any investment, it can pay off in countless different kinds of coin.

Jellyfish serve as a model for bioengineers for the same reason yeast were once so valuable to geneticists: they're simple to deconstruct.

There's no such thing as downtime for your brain.

Your parents leave you too soon and your kids and spouse come along late, but your siblings know you when you are in your most inchoate form.

Vaccines save lives; fear endangers them. It's a simple message parents need to keep hearing.

From the time we're born, our brothers and sisters are our collaborators and coconspirators, our role models and our cautionary tales.

Confidence quickly curdles into arrogance; smarts turn to smugness, charm turns to smarm.

It's not mere extremism that makes folks at the fringes so troubling; it's extremism wedded to false beliefs. Humans have long been dupes, easily gulled by rumors and flat-out lies.

There's a universe inside your head - a place of pictures and passions, of songs and sorrows. It's everything you are - and it's an utter mystery.

When we're awake, cortisol can fragment memories - one reason eyewitness crime scene accounts are so unreliable. But at night that very fragmentation allows creative recombinations of ideas.

In both children and adults, there can be a hard-to-deny link between a robust sense of hope and either work productivity or academic achievement.

People in general are equally horrified at hearing the Christian religion doubted and at seeing it practised.

"What do you think of God " the teacher asked. After a pause the young pupil replied "He's not a think he's a feel."

Everybody talks about finding your voice. Do your homework and your voice will find you.

Theology is only thought applied to religion.

But the day I can't shrug off a twinge of self-pity, is the day I'm washed up for keeps.

If she wasn't careful, she'd slide without a ripple into the gently flowing stream of her old life, pulled back under the current without a wimper of protest. Another housewife lost in the flow.

We're going to raise the estate tax for wealthy, very wealthy people.

Ethanol and biodiesel allow people to burn a cleaner form of energy.

The world makes way for the man who knows where he is going

To name the world in your own terms, to tell your own story, is an act of authority and power. When you write, you are saying, in effect, 'I have a voice. I have a story. This is what I have to say.'