In my experience, staying in a marriage that my ex and I both agreed had all its best moments behind it was epically depressing.
Tortoises can survive for weeks without food or water, easily long enough to float in the Humboldt Current from South America to the Galapagos Islands.
When I was a young man, I shined the shoes of Louis Armstrong and Louis Jordan! Music was just everywhere like that. And in my family, everyone could play something, and if they couldn't play, they could sing.
The satirist shoots to kill while the humorist brings his prey back alive and eventually releases him again for another chance.
If you're not paying for it through the health plan, you pay for it in the emergency room.
Health is relative. There is no such thing as an absolute state of health or sickness. Everyone's physical, mental, and emotional condition is a combination of both.
In everything I write, I'm always striving to hit the right mix of light and darkness, humor and pain, fun and seriousness.
You can get through very serious and sometimes horrible and sometimes embarrassing and very awkward situations with humor. It gives us a way out.
I like gardening - it's a place where I find myself when I need to lose myself.
A vegetable garden in the beginning looks so promising and then after all little by little it grows nothing but vegetables, nothing, nothing but vegetables.
I value my garden more for being full of blackbirds than of cherries, and very frankly give them fruit for their songs.
Help us to be ever faithful gardeners of the spirit, who know that without darkness nothing comes to birth, and without light nothing flowers.
I have an armchair interest in gardening, but I don't like to get my knees dirty. I don't have a garden.
There is an elementary level of trust that is necessary for community. You have to be able to trust that your neighbors aren't going to look into your mailbox.
[last lines] Louis: Looking good, Billy Ray! Billy Ray: Feeling good, Louis!
The hate directed against the colored people here in St. Louis has always given me a sad feeling because when I was a little girl I remember the horror of the East St. Louis race riot.
Chuck Berry told me if it wasn't for Louis Jordan, he wouldn't have probably ever even got into music. That Louis Jordan changed everything and made him want to become a musician.
The medical nanobots in my novel 'Small Miracles' tap the energy sources that the patient's own body provides. That is, they can metabolize glycerol and glucose, just as the cells in our bodies do.
I will say that there is an inordinate amount of medicine in my novels, especially the first one. There are a lot of medical things that happen. A hip fracture, three different kinds of lung cancer, pneumonia, blood poisoning, and so on.
I did know Ted Hughes and I partly wrote the book to explain to myself and others the complexities of a marriage that was for six years wonderfully productive of poetry and then ended in tragedy.
Marriage is not simply a romantic union between two people; it's also a political and economic contract of the highest order.
