Before sight and sound hijacked our attention, we shared with all life a sort of common sense, a chemical sense that depended on direct contact with matter in the water or the air.

If elephants didn't exist, you couldn't invent one. They belong to a small group of living things so unlikely they challenge credulity and common sense.

If the brain were so simple we could understand it, we would be so simple we couldn't.

It is a fascinating and provocative thought that a body of water deserves to be considered as an organism in its own right.

Both dance and dream are brought into being by the consciousness of a moment. They can never be repeated or successfully imitated. But you can dance and dream again. You must, if life is to continue.

I live and work alone and travel light, relying largely on my memory and making a point of letting #‎ intuition guide my way.

YOU'RE ONLY PUTTING OFF THE INEVITABLE, he said.That's what being alive is all about.

As another has well said, to handicap a student by teaching him that his black face is a curse and that his struggle to change his condition is hopeless is the worst sort of lynching.

Whatever I take, I take too much or too little; I do not take the exact amount. The exact amount is no use to me.

Would you rather be right or free?

Above all things I believe in love.

Human experience is usually paradoxical.

Self-defense is Nature's eldest law.

I think that glamour is about confidence and really owning the look.

People are born with the knack to write poems and songs. I'm not a poet at all.

I can do this thing called the 'eyebrow wave,' where I can move my eyebrows in a...wave-ular motion, whatever you call it. I feel like all the teen magazines have sucked me dry of my cool talents.