I stood in the library admiring the huge book collection. There was something inherently calming about being surrounded by books, even their smell and texture was comforting.
The money that could have saved the Shuttle, and the money we send to random countries, that we use to remake unchangeable countries ten thousand miles away.
When you live countless stories in which you play a sedentary role, it's an odd feeling to switch stories.
Life isn't memorable enough to remember everything. It's not like there are explosions all the time, or dog smoking cigarettes.
The same principles that make up a good story also make up a good life.
We don't know how much we are capable of loving until the people we love are being taken away, until a beautiful story is ending.
A story is based on what people think is important, so when we live a story, we are telling people around us what we think is important.
Perhaps one of the reasons I've avoided standing on the point toward the horizon is the second you stand up and point toward a horizon, you realize how much there is to lose.
Every creative person, and I think probably every other person, faces resistance when they are trying to create something good...The harder the resistance, the more important the task must be.
...I wondered about the story we were writing and wanted even more to write a better story for myself, something that leaves a beautiful feeling even as the credits roll.
The inciting incident is how you get (characters) to do something. It's the doorway through which they can't return, you know. The story takes care of the rest.
You get a feeling when you look back on life that all God really wants from us is to live inside a body He made, and enjoy the story, and to bond with Him through the experience.
The human body essentially recreates itself every six months. Nearly every cell of hair and skin and bone dies and another is directed to its former place. You are not who you were last November.
I myself have dreamed up a structure intermediate between Dyson spheres and planets. Build a ring 93 million miles in radius - one Earth orbit - around the sun. If we have the mass of Jupiter to work with, and if we make it a thousand miles wide, we ...
You'd think God would come right out and tell us what to do in the Bible, but He doesn't. He mostly tells stories, and He rarely stops the story to say what the point is. He just lets the characters and conflict hang in the air like smoke.
Life has a peculiar feel when you look back on it that it doesn't have when you're actually living it. It's as though the whole thing were designed to be understood in hindsight, as though you'll never know the meaning of your experiences until you'v...
A man on a thousand mile walk has to forget his goal and say to himself every morning, 'Today I'm going to cover twenty-five miles and then rest up and sleep.
A journey of a thousand mile begins with a SMiLE
We live in a world where bad stories are told, stories that teach us life doesn't mean anything and that humanity has no great purpose. It's a good calling, then, to speak a better story. How brightly a better story shines. How easily the world looks...
Currently where you are is on a huge globe with a relatively thin crust of stone, containing fire in its bowels, rotating on its own slightly tilted axis at 1,000 miles per hour in an easterly direction while simultaneously traveling in orbit around ...
To be a lone filmmaker thousands of miles from home with nobody believing in me, that seems romantic.
