[M]any people believe that memory works like a recording device. You just record the information, then you call it up and play it back when you want to answer questions or identify images. But decades of work in psychology has shown that this just is...
Writers write because they're writers. Because their imaginations boil up inside of them, waiting to overflow into the written word. Ordinary people have little capacity for unyielding imagination, whereas the natural-born writer can do little but yi...
Love is wise; hatred is foolish. In this world, which is getting more and more closely interconnected, we have to learn to tolerate each other, we have to learn to put up with the fact that some people say things that we don't like. We can only live ...
We needed a refrigerator for our new place and I've never bought a refrigerator my whole life. I went into the appliance store, there's like 900 of 'em lined up, there's a salesman there. What's this guy supposed to say about refrigerators? "Well you...
You ask me if I do not think that men are strange beings - I do indeed, I have often thought so - and I think too that the mode of bringing them up is strange, they are not half sufficiently guarded from temptation - Girls are protected as if they we...
I have checked our teleportation technology," Tridax said. "There was no sign of sabotage. You are a liar." "Well, no one ever said Makuta were observant," said Vezon, "How could you be so sure? Suppose I sabotaged it myself using my incredible power...
I know a little bit about trying to do the right thing and fucking up completely." I added. "You talking about mom?" Ben said "I was talking about me." "You could have been talking about all of us. Ben pressed his hand against the glass and my brothe...
My youngest brother had a wonderful schtick from some time in high school, through to graduating medicine. He had a card in his wallet that read, ‘If I am found with amnesia, please give me the following books to read …’ And it listed half a do...
Another very good test some readers may want to look up, which we do not have space to describe here, is the Casimir effect, where forces between metal plates in empty space are modified by the presence of virtual particles. Thus virtual particles ar...
A poem must be authentic. It could be flowery, it could have the most brilliant metaphor, it could be bursting with onomatopoeia and alliteration, assonance and consonance, hyperbole and paradox, from every end, it could have daring syntax and clever...
In short, we would discover, as we should already, that logic is in the eye of the logician. (For instance, here's an idea for theorists and logicians: if women are supposed to be less rational and more emotional at the beginning of our menstrual cyc...
I took off my sweatshirt and dropped it on the grass and set off around the track. As soon as I started running, the world changed. The bodies spread out across the green of the football field were parts of a scene remembered, not one real at this mo...
I'd rather you shot at tin cans in the back yard, but i know you'll go after birds. Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit 'em, but remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird..... Mockingbirds don't do one thing to but make music for us to en...
The scene is most beautiful without people in it. People just screw things up. Forget the whole thing, the world, all the living people, I tell myself, and it has a ring of truth to it. The dead are better, aren't they? The dead don't betray or harm....
We didn’t deny the obvious, but we didn’t entirely accept it either. I mean, we said hello to it each morning in the foyer. We patted its little head as it made a mess in the backyard, but we never nurtured it. Many nights the obvious showed up a...
False humility is a form of psychosis which was imprinted on most of us since birth. It is a mental illness because it locks us in a victim state of keeping our light turned down, denying who we really are and silently begging for permission to simpl...
Always remember that no matter how beautiful you are, you're only as beautiful as the level of respect and love you give to your ownself. Ofcourse, along the way you will make mistakes and some mistakes will pull you to your lowest, but every mistake...
Will there ever be an encyclopedia? Possibly. I would say two things about the encyclopedia: firstly, I’ve always said and I stand by it, whenever I do do a printed encyclopedia I would like all the proceeds to go to charity. Back in 1998 I never d...
The Pacific is my home ocean; I knew it first, grew up on its shore, collected marine animals along the coast. I know its moods, its color, its nature. It was very far inland that I caught the first smell of the Pacific. When one has been long at sea...
Cyrus wanted a woman to take care of Adam. He needed someone to keep house and cook, and a servant cost money. He was a vigorous man and needed the body of a woman, and that too cost money- unless you were married to it. Within two weeks Cyrus had wo...
I whispered to Dad during Rosh Hashanah services, "Do you believe in God?" "Not really," he said. "No." "Then why do we come here?" He sucked thoughfully on his Tums tablet and put his arm around me, draping me under his musty woolen prayer shawl, an...
