“Every reader gets something different from a book and every reader, in a sense, completes it in a different way.”

Each future moves in a different direction of time. Each future is real.

Scientists turn reckless and mutter like gamblers who cannot stop betting. Scientists are buffoons, not because they are rational but because the cosmos is irrational.

A book, especially a longer book, it’s a different kind of force that pushes you through it. It’s a vision of the whole thing.

Sadness is no more than a bit of acid transfixed in the cerebellum.

I consider myself an essayist and a fiction writer. In the essays, I certainly have been influenced by some of the leading science essayists. Like Loren Eiseley, Stephen Jay Gould, Lewis Thomas.

Suppose time is a circle, bending back on itself. The world repeats itself, precisely, endlessly.

We have become disembodied. By being always somewhere else we are nowhere.

In restaurants, walking, they have cell phones clamped to their to heads.

No one knows the nature of God, or even if God exists. In a sense, all of our religions are literary works of the imagination.

Body time flows at its own variable rate, oblivious to the most precise hydrogen master clocks in the laboratory. In fact, the human body contains its own exquisite time-pieces, all with their separate rhythms.

That’s an exciting thing. In a class of fifteen there are usually two very good writers, equal to good student writers anywhere in the country. Those two make the class wonderful.

In a world in which time is a circle, every handshake, every kiss, every birth, every word, will be repeated precisely.

A world in which time is absolute is a world of consolation.

That’s the fine balance of a fiction writer…to be able to give your characters enough freedom to surprise you and yet still maintain some kind of artistic control.

Oh, love is very much a physical thing…. I realize that it’s very complicated, and I’m sure it can’t be traced to individual neurons and hormones, but I think it’s very much a physiological sensation that takes place in the brain.

I am spellbound by the plays of Shakespeare. And I am spellbound by the second law of thermodynamics.

Steady practice is keeping mindful in every posture, whether sitting, walking, standing or lying down.

The ladle is in the soup pot every day, but it doesn’t know the taste of the soup. You must reflect and meditate.

A good practice is to ask yourself very sincerely, ‘Why was I born?’ Ask yourself this question in the morning, in the afternoon, and at night…every day.

Every time you play you have energy within you – universal energy.

I’m getting paid to wake up America every morning!

Finally he closed the distance between us and kissed me – a sweet, gentle kiss that held within it every single one of the thousand days I’d loved him as my everything, long after I’d begun to love him as a friend.

Harriet Tubman is the perpetuation of a “Super Soul Sunday” every day.

Now I remember every time I was with Shouji I felt better. You hugged me secretly with your heart, didn’t you? Now I want you to embrace me with all that warmth, with all your strength.