“We agreed with him in principal – we were little scientists, born and bred. But children robbed of love will dwell on magic.”

Many of us who aren’t farmers or gardeners still have some element of farm nostalgia in our family past, real or imagined: a secret longing for some connection to a life where a rooster crows in the yard.

It’s terrible to lose somebody, but it’s also true that some people never have anybody to lose, and I think that’s got to be so much worse.

The substance of grief is not imaginary. It’s as real as rope or the absence of air, and like both those things, it can kill.

As a biologist, I can’t think of myself as anything but an animal among animals and plant.

From the fallen tree everybody makes firewood.

There is no point treating a depressed person as though she were just feeling sad, saying, ‘There now, hang on, you’ll get over it.’ Sadness is more or less like a head cold- with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.

Now, see, that’s why you want Internet friends. You can find people just exactly like you. Screw your neighbors and your family, too messy…the trouble is, once you filter out everybody that doesn’t agree with you, all that’s left is maybe this one retired surfer guy living in Idaho.

A writer’s occupational hazard: I think of eavesdropping as minding my business.

Recall that whatever lofty things you might accomplish today, you will do them only because you first ate something that grew out of the dirt.

In the day-to-day, farm work is stress relief for me. At the end of the day, I love having this other career – my anti-job – that keeps me in shape and gives me control over a vegetal domain.

I’m not pretending to be ingenuous; I know what I’m doing.

You see mother, you had no life of your own. They have no idea. One has only a life of one’s own.

A person could spend most of a lifetime in retrospective terror, thinking of all the things one nearly didn’t do.

The truth needs so little rehearsal.

My worst nightmare is being stuck somewhere with nothing to read.

I’m of a fearsome mind to throw my arms around every living librarian who crosses my path, on behalf of the souls they never knew they saved.

I do think that stand-up comedy in general heavily favors masculinity and so I like to act a little feminine onstage.

I definitely can feel the third or fourth feminist wave in the air, so maybe this is a good time to open that Pandora’s box a little bit and air it out.

I’m not in politics. I’m really not a public figure. But I’m trying to be a little more cognizant of my surroundings.

My grandmother played the piano, and I used to toddle over there and pick out little things that sounded good to me.

Everything is getting bigger. The way to go now is to program in a little more sophistication.

People who have little to do are excessive talkers.

In fact, corporations are the infants of our society – they know very little except how to grow (though they’re very good at that), and they howl when you set limits. Socializing them is the work of politics. It’s about time we took it up again.

I feel a little guilty only being an actor.