I have never seen a proton or electron spinning around it. I have never actually seen a chromosome. I trust that they exist because people who I trust tell me they do.

Our bodies like rhythm and our brains like melody and harmony.

A bowl of pudding only has taste when I put it in my mouth - when it is in contact with my tongue. It doesn't have taste or flavor sitting in my fridge, only the potential.

The constant nagging in your mind of undone things pulls you out of the present--tethers you to a mind-set of the future so that you're never fully in the moment and enjoying what's now.

The most fundamental principle of the organized mind, the one most critical to keeping us from forgetting or losing things, is to shift the burden of organizing from our brains to the external world.

The first forms of writing emerged not for art, literature, or love, not for spiritual or liturgical purposes, but for business--all literature could be said to originate from sales receipts (sorry).

No other species lives with regret over past events, or makes deliberate plans for future ones.

Another possibility is that evolution selected creativity in general as a marker of sexual fitness.

What makes a set of lines and colors into art is the relationship between this line and that one; the way one color or form echoes another in a different part of the canvas.

The amount of scientific information we've discovered in the last twenty years is more than all the discoveries up to that point, from the beginning of language.

Librarians are more important than ever before ... are uniquely qualified to help all of us separate the digital wheat from the chaff, to help us understand the reliability of the data we encounter.

Write the kind of story you would like to read. People will give you all sorts of advice about writing, but if you are not writing something you like, no one else will like it either.

Trends of the times be damned.

It would seem very silly to start a conversation with a common hedgehog. They are not at all like cats, who surely understand the human language.

When I sing, I play in my mind; the minute I stop singing orally, I start to sing by playing Lucille.

Isn't it funny how day by day nothing changes, but when you look back, everything is different.

I like to find what's not found at once, but lies within something of another nature, in repose, distinct.

In the mercy of God, the little thing done with humility will enable us to be found in the same place as the saints who have labored much and been true servants of God.

Progress will always have as its recourse to exaggerate what it cannot surpass.

I am not a fan of historical fiction that is sloppy in its research or is dishonest about the real history.

Your legacy should be that you made it better than it was when you got it.