“Energy is liberated matter, matter is energy waiting to happen.”

… it occurred to me that never again would he be seven years, one month and six days old, so we had better catch these moments while we can.

A cough so robust that I tapped into two new seams of phlegm.

Americans now get in a car. On average the total walking of an American these days – that’s walking of all types: from car to office, from office to car, around the supermarket and shopping malls – adds up to 1.4 miles a week, barely 350 yards a day.

But here’s an extrememly salient point: we have been chosen, by fate or Providence or whatever you wish to call it. As far as we can tell, we are the best there is.

On the dashboard of our family car is a shallow indentation about the size of a paperback book. If you are looking for somewhere to put your sunglasses or spare change, it is the obvious place, and it works extremely well,

The people are immensely likable- cheerful, extrovert, quick-witted, and unfailingly obliging. Their cities are safe and clean and nearly always built on water. They have a society that is prosperous, well ordered, and instinctively egalitarian.

All the things that are part of your heritage make you British – that makes this country what it is. It’s part of your history. And here, unlike America, it’s still living history.

A belief that no commercial activities must be allowed inside the park, but permitting unrestrained development outside, even though the landscape there may be just as outstanding.

As a rule of thumb, I would submit that if you need to call your floss provider, for any reason, you are probably not ready for this level of oral hygiene.

You are going to have a day without even the tiniest of pleasures; you are going to drive across Ohio.

I have long known that it is part of God’s plan for me to spend a little time with each of the most stupid people on earth.

You can be a scientist and believe in god: the two can go hand in hand.

I come from Des Moines. Someone had to.

Because we humans are big and clever enough to produce and utilize antibiotics and disinfectants, it is easy to convince ourselves that we have banished bacteria to the fringes of existence.

I’m not a natural story-teller. Put a keyboard in front of me and I’m fine, but stand me up in front of an audience and I’m actually quite shy and reserved.

Everything that has ever lived, plant or animal, dates its beginning from the same primordial twitch. At some point in an unimaginably distant past, some little bag of chemicals fidgeted to life. It absorbed some nutrients, gently pulsed, had a brief existence.

Create your own path and stop waiting for things to come your way. The longer you wait, the further others go.

You can only get next to God through the effort of preparation. To experience the uncreated, the state of awareness will have to be held for several minutes. You are then between time and the time-less – waiting for the unknown, which will come but cannot be willed.

All is waiting and all is work; all is change and all is permanence.

In business, you’re the Chief Salesman. Create a sense of demand, rather than waiting to have demand.

As I grow older part of my emotional survival plan must be to actively seek inspiration instead of passively waiting for it to find me.

I think that most writers who wait until they’re inspired to write are just waiting for the fear to subside.

Textbook survival tells you to stay put. Stop. Wait for rescue. Don’t take any risks. But there’d been a whole host of survival shows like that and I didn’t really want to do that.

Wait not while your foe fits arrow to bowstring when you can send your own arrow into him.