Anyone who has spent a few nights in a tent during a storm can tell you: The world doesn't care all that much if you live or die.

Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.

Time is a slippery thing: lose hold of it once, and its string might sail out of your hands forever.

To say a person is a happy person or an unhappy person is ridiculous. We are a thousand different kinds of people every hour.

So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?

My preference is for prose with more silence in it, language that contains more pockets of strangeness.

Watching teething babies is like watching over a thermonuclear reactor-it is best done in shifts, by well-rested people.

It's embarrassingly plain how inadequate language is.

Leave home, leave the country, leave the familiar. Only then can routine experience--buying bread, eating vegetables, even saying hello--become new all over again.

A real diamond is never perfect.

For me, writing historical fiction is all about finding a balance between reading, traveling, looking, imagining, and dreaming.

Joblessness gives you the resource through which you can create a new you

I guess that’s the beauty of books. When they finish they don’t really finish.

Distance is meaningless, as is time, when minds and souls intertwine.”-Gerome in CHANGELING-

At lunch you order steamed vegetables because you're remembering that you have a heart too. You feel humbled by your heart, it works so hard. You want to thank it. You give your heart a little pat

He was impregnably armored by his good intentions and his ignorance.

Irrationality is the exclusive preserve of humans as among all creatures only we have the power to rationalise, that being the art of packaging patently irrational as apparently rational.

I'm a hacker, but I'm the good kind of hackers. And I've never been a criminal.

I am an investigator by inclination. I feel a great thirst for knowledge.

Happiness is baking cookies. Happiness is giving them away. And serving them, and eating them, talking about them, reading and writing about them, thinking about them, and sharing them with you.

Spirituality in Washington can be more of a - I don't want to say it - but, a networking opportunity. Religion is often used opportunistically in the political conversation.