It marked the beginning and, of course, an end. At that moment a chapter, no, a whole stage of my closed. Had I known, and had there been a spare second or two, I might have allowed myself a little nostalgia.
Books wrote our life story, and as they accumulated on our shelves (and on our windowsills, and underneath our sofa, and on top of our refrigerator), they became chapters in it themselves.
The classical anthropological question, What is man?—"how like an angel, this quintessence of dust!"—is not now asked by anthropologists. Instead, they commence with a chapter on Physical Anthropology and then forget the whole topic and go on to ...
In a massive, long-term study of 17,000 civil servants, an almost unbelievable conclusion emerged: the status of a person's job was more likely to predict their likelihood of a heart attack than obesity, smoking or high blood pressure.
The genome is as complicated and indeterminate as ordinary life, because it is ordinary life. This should come as a relief. Simple determinism, whether of the genetics or environmental kind, is a depressing prospect for those with a fondness for free...
Though everyone may yearn for a tranquil death, the basic instinct to stay alive is a far more powerful force
You have to understand that while I pre-plot the meta story of a given book, I often have no idea of what will happen on the next page, let alone the next chapter. That's what makes it fun for me; I write the books the same way many people read them.
I may conclude this chapter by quoting a saying of Professor , that whenever a new and startling fact is brought to light in science, people first say, 'it is not true,' then that 'it is contrary to religion,' and lastly, 'that everybody knew it befo...
I wonder whether there is such a thing as a sense of individuality. Is it all a facade, covering a deep need to belong? Are we simply pack animals desperately trying to pretend we are not?
Uncomplicate it. Don’t make excuses. Some of life’s biggest heartaches come from missed opportunities and lame excuses. Don’t miss out on what could be the best chapter in your life because you’re too busy rereading the last one.
Miss Howard: Like a good detective story myself. Lots of nonsense written, though. Criminal discovered in last Chapter. Everyone dumbfounded. Real crime - you'd know at once.
He was like a book, where each chapter picks up pace until you can't put it down. That's when you know you've made a friend - when you want to read more of his story.
Whatever had happened, she wondered, to the concept of reading as entertainment? Now it appeared to be an endurance contest as to how many pages the reader could get through without throwing up. (Lorinda, chapter 1)
It is always important to know when something has reached its end. Closing circles, shutting doors, finishing chapters, it doesn't matter what we call it; what matters is to leave in the past those moments in life that are over.
In the original introduction to the word meme in the last chapter of 'The Selfish Gene,' I did actually use the metaphor of a 'virus.' So when anybody talks about something going viral on the Internet, that is exactly what a meme is, and it looks as ...
I thought I could never write a proper book; I'd never done it before. But I thought I could write a sequence. Then I had a chapter. The next thing I knew I was turning acting down.
It can be difficult workshopping novels because any questions or qualms you have as the author can be like, 'That's next chapter, don't worry about it!' I don't think the workshop is set up so well to do that for novels.
The book did not say anything about a statue, valuable or otherwise, and so I stopped reading about the Bombinating Beast and got interested in the chapter about the Stain'd witches, who had ink instead of blood in their veins. I wondered what they k...
The silencing of the Haitian Revolution is only a chapter within a narrative of global domination. It is part of the history of the West and it is likely to persist, even in attenuated form, as long as the history of the West is not retold in ways th...
I think that if you have a knack for storytelling, and you work really hard at it, you'll have a chance to tap into something deep. But the fact remains that good sentences are hard won. Any writer worth a lick knows constructing a sentence, a paragr...
I plot the first 5 or 6 chapters quite minutely, and also the end. So I know where I am going but not how I'm going to get there, which gives characters the chance to develop organically, as happens in real life as you get to know a person.
