What makes spinal-cord injuries as devastating as they are is that everything about them plays out in absolutes: they are instantaneous, utterly disabling and horribly permanent.

Jellyfish serve as a model for bioengineers for the same reason yeast were once so valuable to geneticists: they're simple to deconstruct.

There's no such thing as downtime for your brain.

Your parents leave you too soon and your kids and spouse come along late, but your siblings know you when you are in your most inchoate form.

Vaccines save lives; fear endangers them. It's a simple message parents need to keep hearing.

From the time we're born, our brothers and sisters are our collaborators and coconspirators, our role models and our cautionary tales.

Confidence quickly curdles into arrogance; smarts turn to smugness, charm turns to smarm.

It's not mere extremism that makes folks at the fringes so troubling; it's extremism wedded to false beliefs. Humans have long been dupes, easily gulled by rumors and flat-out lies.

There's a universe inside your head - a place of pictures and passions, of songs and sorrows. It's everything you are - and it's an utter mystery.

When we're awake, cortisol can fragment memories - one reason eyewitness crime scene accounts are so unreliable. But at night that very fragmentation allows creative recombinations of ideas.

In both children and adults, there can be a hard-to-deny link between a robust sense of hope and either work productivity or academic achievement.

That was what it meant to be a woman: to live in an unbearable agony hidden for a time behind smoke and mirrors.

No second chances in the land of a thousand dances, the valley of ten million insanities.

I think if you're going to make political art, you have to engage at some level. You can't just write about politics, you have to try and be politics as well.

The door on which we have been knocking all our lives will open at last.

Worship is an act that develops feelings for God, not a feeling for God that is expressed in an act of worship.

There are still horrible things that go on because of the myth of race, but we don't have to succumb totally.

Never ask a man where he has been.

I'm a person who has to eat! I graze every few hours.

Standing to America, bringing home black gold, black ivory, black seed.