Richard Feynman was fond of giving the following advice on how to be a genius. You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a n...
What an abundant harvest has been collected in autumn! The earth has now fulfilled its design for this year, and is going to repose for a short time. Thus nature is continually employed during the greatest part of the year: even in her rest she is ac...
I grieved three thousand times. Then I grieved for myself, a lonely woman without the honor given to the wives of the fallen. The reverence for their loss, for their children's loss. It was eloquent and grand. So moving and charged with solidarity......
I have never experienced writers block and I've written every day since June 1972. But I have experienced the need to get up and walk around, eat ice cream, let ideas percolate, forget the story for a time, and then return to the page. Even the muse ...
We stopped to browse in the cases, and now that William - with his new glasses on his nose - could linger and read the books, at every title he discovered he let out exclamations of happiness, either because he knew the work, or because he had been s...
What does it say?" asked my lord. "It says, `Good-night, God keep you all the night!'--just what she used to say when we were together. Every night she used to say that to me, and every morning she said, `God bless you all the day!' So you see I am q...
Summer, dropping so easily a delicious everything upon your skin and lips. Like a never-ending kiss—taunting, deep, and luscious. The sun. The heat. The thousand echoes of a timelessness before time, when every day seems longer than the next and no...
I remember the second time I took Agatha out. I wanted to go to Dairy Queen, and she wanted to go to Burger King. In the end we settled for wieners and clams at Johnny Hermaphrodite’s.
I’m on the west coast. I am Lewis and Clark. I am Lewis Clark. Like the time I got a Denver Omelet in Dallas with a girl named Charlotte Washington.
Too bad Agatha was colorblind, because she had no idea how beautiful her eyes were. Agatha’s eyes were grey, blue, green, and brown, though never all at once and never more than two eyes at a time.
Life is a test. It was designed to be so. It is where we taste the bitter and the sweet; where we feel pain and pleasure; where we learn right from wrong; where we pass through both darkness and light. It is a time to make choices. And throug...
I was starting to wonder if I was ready to be a writer, not someone who won prizes, got published and was given the time and space to work, but someone who wrote as a course of life. Maybe writing wouldn't have any rewards. Maybe the salvation I woul...
My father told me by the time you die you'll be lucky if you have six people you called your friends to carry your coffin.I now realize and believe the truth is I thought if I had a dollar for every friend I in my life I'd be rich. The sad truth is i...
Deciding we won't drive to that chain grocery store and buy that imported pineapple is a path to liberation. Deciding to walk to the farmers' market and buy fresh, local peas is like spitting in the eye of the industries that control us. Every act of...
Her bed felt huge and empty now, and when she slept, she did so with her arm around a pillow. She dreamed of him almost every night, sometimes good dreams of happy days and joyful times; often they were terrible dreams of abandonment, loss and sorrow...
Since the first day I met you,that first glance at your eyes,the first time you told me you loved me, my life was changed forever, your love made me who I am today,your presence in my life inspires me to be better every day, I love you with all my se...
Oftentimes at Yale, I'll be sitting around studying or drinking or hanging out when I'll hear one of my friends talk about a project they're doing for a class or a rally they're organizing or a play they're putting on. And I'll just think, really, ho...
That’s crazy,” Gabriel said. “We must be seventy million years in the past.” “Nearly a hundred and twenty-five million,” Ohin said. “It seems far, but time is really interrelational. Every moment is just as far from every other. “Righ...
Perfection of effort is not required, by the way. It is the consistency of attempting to work these tools that brings the progress. It’s like anything else. If I want to tone muscle, lifting a ten-pound weight a few times every day will move me tow...
One of the many things I learned at the end of that Classics corridor down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I could not then define, was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch: What we achieve inwardly will change outer r...
Don Fernando de Guzman: All the land to our left and all the land to our right now belongs to us. I solemnly and formally take possession of all this land. Our country is already six times larger than Spain, and every day we drift makes it bigger. Do...
