In the winter, I enjoy cross-country skiing and raising orchids and amaryllises. If I could grow tropical flowers as perennials, I would, especially hibiscus and mandavilla.

Look in the mirror. The face that pins you with its double gaze reveals a chastening secret.

Nothing is more memorable than a smell. One scent can be unexpected, momentary and fleeting, yet conjure up a childhood summer beside a lake in the mountains...

I don't want to get to the end of my life and find that I lived just the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.

It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between.

I swear I will not dishonor my soul with hatred, but offer myself humbly as a guardian of nature, as a healer of misery, as a messenger of wonder, as an architect of peace.

Wonder is the heaviest element on the periodic table. Even a tiny fleck of it stops time.

No matter how politely one says it, we owe our existence to the farts of blue-green algae.

Words are such small things, like confetti in the brain, and yet they are color and clarify everything, they can stain the mind or warp the feelings.

The heart is a museum, filled with the exhibits of a lifetime's loves.

We live on the leash of our senses. There is no way in which to understand the world without first detecting it through the radar-net of our senses.

You don't have to kiss a lot of frogs to recognize a prince when you find one."-Henrietta Barrett, (Minx, Splendid Trilogy book #3)

The spirit of social computing is the concept of leaving value in your wake.

The tendency toward good in human nature has a force which no creed can utterly counteract, and which insures the ultimate triumph of that tendency over all dogmatic perversions.

The number of clicks on display ads is not an accurate predictor of the effectiveness of online display ads.

The truth can be made up if you know how.

I like funny guys and those, for some reason, tend to be nerdy guys.

All our stories are part invention - the way we've decided to make sense of what has happened.

George Harrison was known as the quiet Beatle. Quiet people are often quiet because they are deep thinkers.

Gatting at fine leg - that's a contradiction in terms.

In the long run, doing work that's important leads to more happiness than doing work that's merely profitable.