When he got a story urge, there was nothing to do but grab a pen and write. Otherwise it was too much like getting a hard-on and not jerking off.

Was there anything quite so painful, so fraught with the possibilities of hurt, as gift giving within a family?

Soon would come the night in which there was no more work – not the work of the hands, nor the work of the mind, nor the work of the heart.

Still, for all that, her life had lacked passion. The demons had never come for her.

Education teaches children to lose interest in what matters most to them.

Just because you pretend the universe doesn't have teeth doesn't mean you won't get eaten in the end.

The body was an organic machine, period, and God was a figment of its fitful imagination.

But men are such strange creatures, really. I think most of them would rather we weren’t around at all, so they could just spend time mooning over each other. Hero worship and all that stuff.

The past is the past. It’s the present we should worry about.

It was a failure of pedagogical nerve, she reminded herself, to give up on a student.

All desire, Tracy had had occasion since to think, is to some degree monstrous.

Everyone must be given the opportunity to think, read and write.

Wisdom is creating connections between the current perceptual realities with future imaginative possibilities.

It is not what we know that scares us, it is what we do not

You have to love your children unselfishly. That's hard. But it's the only way.

Now, the country is in a terrible state, and you've blamed it on a number of things: Unemployment rate, the value of the pound and all that... wrll, it's because the national anthem is boring.

Why make plans? The sun might well go out tomorrow.

History does not move by leaps into unrelated novelty, but rather by the selective emphasis of aspects of its own immediate past.

Being a producer is a very different experience than writing my own songs.

I am content and happy with my situation and like the flexibility that comes with being self-employed. And it's nice to know that I can contribute something to society

But one, the lofty follower of the Sun, Sad when he sets, shuts up her yellow leaves Drooping all night; and, when he warm returns, Points her enamoured bosom to his ray.