As I have aged, I’ve been lucky never to reach old. Old is always at least five or ten years beyond my current calendar stage.

I had always been a boy in this place, and many of the trees and rocks and streams had been old men when I knew them. Some had died. All had changed. I knew that. I had changed the most.

The world bein’ so small ain’t always a good thing for those of us who ain’t searchin’ for new and different stuff.

One of the worst things I’ve learned about getting older is that there seems to be more change that you don’t like than there was when you were younger and you can’t do nothin’ about it.

Just make sure the day doesn’t pass without sayin’ what’s in your heart. Sometimes you pass up those chances and they’re gone forever.

Our bird of hope was being denied the altitude it sought, just free enough to fly dangerously close to the reality of the treetops.

As an adult I had mastered the art of looking without seeing and listening without hearing and eating without tasting and maybe even existing without living.

Sometimes, you need to spit stuff out in words to get it better arranged in your head. I figure if you never talk about it, it just picks its own spot and lays there and festers.

What a wonderful sadness to miss the one you have loved forever, it seems, and know that she is waiting at home.

Memories with laughter are the best ones to keep.

I assumed that looking back reminded older guys of what they had shot at and missed, the what-ifs, the good memories, the bad, the people left behind, the people who moved on.

If you’re trying to tell me you’re not used to mattering to someone, I might just bleed out right here on the floor.

I’ve always had a thing for men with large hadron colliders.

Sotomayor's vainglorious lecture bromide about herself as 'a wise Latina' trumping white men is a vulgar embarrassment - a vestige of the bad old days of male-bashing feminism.

To me programming is more than an important practical art. It is also a gigantic undertaking in the foundations of knowledge.

Geology, in the magnitude and sublimity of the objects of which it treats, undoubtedly ranks, in the scale of the sciences, next to astronomy.

Whitehead reacted strongly against the idea of God as a cosmic tyrant, one who brings about everything.

I have really good female friends. I've never bought the whole men-and-women-can't-be-friends thing. I think that's sort of nonsense.

When it's colder, your skin needs more attention.

When you're dealing with the universe, ignorance can be deadly.