The world is so exquisite, with so much love and moral depth, that there is no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories for which there's little goodevidence.

Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.

It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.

Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere.

I don't want to believe. I want to know.

The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence.

The brain is like a muscle. When it is in use we feel very good. Understanding is joyous.

We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.

For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.

You have to know the past to understand the present.

A flower’s beauty is birthed in a seed’s ugly struggles.

Put the coffee on, bubbles, I'm coming home

I was a little, uh, incorrigible as a kid, so the kitchen was a good place to give me structure and balance. It taught me hard work, but then I grew to love it.

You gotta just laugh at yourself and let it go and not take things too seriously because life is too short.

Slavery is nothing to joke about! And the history of this nation's [the USA's] involvement with slavery is nothing to pass off in a joke.

I'm not very much of a reader really, because I find much of it very bad, very uninteresting, very speculative.

that expression you get in your eyes when you are very tired and everything is like a dream and you are starting to know what things are like underneath what people say they are.

Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time.

Keep your head down, work hard, and don't ever believe your own hype, because... you just keep working.

They can romanticize us so, mirrors, and that is their secret: what a subtle torture it would be to destroy all the mirrors in the world: where then could we look for reassurance of our identities?