“And if the present has little effect on the future, present actions need not be weighed for their consequence.”

Scientists will forever have to live with the fact that their product is, in the end, impersonal.

Is anything so pure? Or is love, by its nature, a reciprocity, like oceans and clouds, an evaporating of seawater and a replenishing of rain?

We don’t have the time, literally, to think during the day. To listen to ourselves think. To think about where we are going, who we are, what’s important.

Another strand of my writing is the importance of the idea.

We walk from room to room, look into the room that is lit, the present moment, then walk on. We do not know the rooms ahead, but we know we cannot change them. We are spectators of our lives.

Everyone shares the same fate.

Their predictions become postdictions- Their equations become justifications, their logic, illogic.

And beyond any particular clock, a vast scaffold of time, stretching across the universe, lays down the law of time equally for all.

You say, “Something important really happened here. I really had hold of something I was visited by the muse.” And that’s enough to make you continue the months and years to finish the whole book.

All writers have roots they draw from – travel, work, family. My roots are in science and it is fertile ground for fiction.

Sexual arousal is no more than a flow of chemicals to certain nerve endings.

It is a world of impulse. It is a world of sincerity.

I would bet most people don’t have thirty minutes in a day where they can just sit down and think. Or maybe they don’t have to be sitting, they can be walking.

It’s not necessarily a large number of people that affect the culture. You don’t count the number of influential voices, you weigh them. A hundred people can affect the culture.

The Book of Telling tells of a woman’s journey to uncover the secret life of her father and to find herself in the process.

If a person holds ambitions, he suffers knowingly, but very slowly.

So much nearer to Nature than civilized men are; absurd then to maintain cruelty is a consequence of depravity. . . .

Some mistakes… Just have greater consequences than others. But you don’t have to let the result of one mistake be the thing that defines you.

I think our nation faces enormous challenges, and we need leaders who are willing to tell the truth and do the right thing regardless of the consequences.

I chose to walk on this journey, because I solely believed in it and wholeheartedly decided to do so, and I’m willing and able to pay for the consequences.

Men outlive their love, but they don’t outlive the consequences of their recklessness.

The woman spread her legs, and made me look between them. All I could see was something that looked like a dyin’ orchid; consequently, I have never been comfortable around women or orchids.

To all those who have suffered as a consequence of our troubled past I extend my sincere thoughts and deep sympathy. With the benefit of historical hindsight we can all see things which we would wish had been done differently or not at all.

Haunted by wrong turns and roads not taken, we pursue images perceived as new but whose providence dates to the dim dramas of childhood, which are themselves but ripples of consequence echoing down the generations.