This is how deeply rooted stories are, folks. We crave them before we can walk, and we start telling them before we can talk.

When we are children we seldom think of the future. This innocence leaves us free to enjoy ourselves as few adults can. The day we fret about the future is the day we leave our childhood behind.

Words are pale shadows of forgotten names. As names have power, words have power. Words can light fires in the minds of men. Words can wring tears from the hardest hearts.

I have, of course, been called many other things. Most of them uncouth, although very few were unearned

The world is a mess and I just need to rule it.

Half of seeming clever is keeping your mouth shut at the right times.

It's like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story.

It was wise enough to know itself, and brave enough to be itself, and wild enough to change itself while somehow staying altogether true.

If I seem to wander, if I seem to stray, remember that true stories seldom take the straightest way

There are three things all wise men fear: the sea in storm, a night with no moon, and the anger of a gentle man.

Do not mistake me for my mask. You see light dappling on the water and forget the deep, cold dark beneath.

My great-great grandfather and I were the best of friends, although we never met

Trees are poems that the earth writes upon the sky.

Students can do experiments and investigate for themselves what's going on in restaurants, in our food system, and begin a process of learning.

Man's will and God's grace rise and fall together

Reading was my first solitary vice (and led to all others). I read while I ate, I read in the loo, I read in the bath. When I was supposed to be sleeping, I was reading.

Dennis to friend: No use crying, Joey. There aren't any grownups around.

The voice I had accepted as Divine Guidance was actually the voice of my ego leading me right into destruction.

Do away with the corporate loopholes that allow major profitable corporations to stash their money in the Cayman Islands and not pay a nickel in some cases in federal income taxes.

Go to parties. You can't even start to know what you may find on the envelope of serendipity. If you suffer from agoraphobia, send colleagues.

Electricity is of two kinds, positive and negative. The difference is, I presume, that one comes a little more expensive, but is more durable; the other is a cheaper thing, but the moths get into it.