When the sun shines you cannot see the moon, " he said. "But when the sun is gone ah, when the sun is gone.

A mother's love for her child is like nothing else in the world. It knows no law, no pity, it dares all things and crushes down remorselessly all that stands in its path.

An archaeologist is the best husband a woman can have. The older she gets the more interested he is in her.

I don't think necessity is the mother of invention. Invention, in my opinion, arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness - to save oneself trouble.

It is ridiculous to set a detective story in New York City. New York City is itself a detective story.

Very few of us are what we seem.

Dogs are wise. They crawl away into a quiet corner and lick their wounds and do not rejoin the world until they are whole once more.

Nobody knows what another person is thinking. They may imagine they do, but they are nearly always wrong.

Fear is incomplete knowledge.

Books are a habit-forming drug.

I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.

Something is significantly wrong with the creature that sacrifices its children's lives in order to settle its differences.

I always find that if I sit down, a solution presents itself!

Quite frankly, the bible is filled with advice that you'd never, want to follow. "Don't cut your hair on a rainy Thursday because locusts will eat your farm" kind of thing.

I do not want to criticize while my soldiers are still bleeding and dying in Iraq.

There is nothing more certain than the defeat of the man who gives up.

I was always interested in myths growing up. So, first I got into some Roman myths, then I was interested in Norse, then Celtic, then I started spreading to all the other mythologies.

By justification we are saved from the guilt of sin…by sanctification we are saved from the power and root of sin

Some people are faster than others; I'm just figuring it out later, that's all. I'm getting smart too late and old too soon.

Academia is a rarified culture, especially an Ivy League academic background.