“I love life. But it is hard and I have so much, so very much to learn.”

Life has been some combination of fairy-tale coincidence and joie de vivre and shocks of beauty together with some hurtful self-questioning.

See, the darkness is leaking from the cracks. I cannot contain it. I cannot contain my life.

What I fear most, I think, is the death of the imagination.

A man’s world is different from a woman’s world and a man’s emotions are different from a woman’s emotions and only marriage can bring the two different sets of emotions together properly.

What horrifies me most is the idea of being useless: well-educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle age.

Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.

The hardest thing, I think, is to live richly in the present, without letting it be tainted and spoiled out of fear for the future or regret for a badly-managed past.

So much working, reading, thinking, living to do! A lifetime is not long enough.

Eternity bores me, I never wanted it.

Intoxicated with madness, I’m in love with my sadness.

Aloneness and selfness are too important to betray for company.

There is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends.

I hate handing over money to people for doing what I could just as easily do myself, it makes me nervous.

I felt myself melting into the shadows like the negative of a person I’d never seen before in my life.

The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn’t thought about it.

I want to taste and glory in each day, and never be afraid to experience pain; and never shut myself up in a numb core of nonfeeling, or stop questioning and criticizing life and take the easy way out.

It is one of the more striking generalizations of biochemistry – which surprisingly is hardly ever mentioned in the biochemical textbooks – that the twenty amino acids and the four bases, are, with minor reservations, the same throughout Nature.

The hardest part of living is experiencing death without dying.

The hardest part of living is experiencing death without dying.

I just gotta not suck; which is hard, considering exactly who I am.

To my younger self, I would say not to be so hard on yourself. I think that you are your biggest critic.

Don’t use the hardships of your past as excuses to deny the possibilities of your future.

If you can stare hard at your problems, they almost always shrink or disappear, because you almost always find a better way of dealing with them than if you don’t face them head on. The more difficult the problem, the more important it is that you stare at it and deal with it.

When you start in science, you are brainwashed into believing how careful you must be, and how difficult it is to discover things. There’s something that might be called the ‘graduate student syndrome’; graduate students hardly believe they can make a discovery.