“We understand ourselves through stories, by making stories out of our lives. Storytellers give people structure with which they can begin to look at their own lives and try to make sense of them.”

In the library I discovered that you could learn by following your nose. And I learned that a book was as close to a living thing as you could get without being one.

Every child needs a safe place to fall – a place where he or she can explore things without worrying about failure and judgment.

Once a kid learns a library is hers, to use as she wants, the world opens up., I’ve seen it happen. It happened to me.

Who could have foretold, from the structure of the brain, that wine could derange its functions?

A wrong concept misleads the understanding; a wrong deed degrades the whole man, and may eventually demolish the structure of the human ego.

I went straight from high school to ‘Gossip Girl,’ and both were very structured, scheduled environments, so I never had freedom to explore and carve my own path.

Like a French poem is life; being only perfect in structure when with the masculine rhymes mingled the feminine are.

Like a shipwreck or a jetty, almost anything that forms a structure in the ocean, whether it is natural or artificial over time, collects life.

The citation for the 1971 Nobel Prize in Chemistry reads, ‘for contribution to the knowledge of electronic structures and geometry of molecules, especially free radicals,’ and therefore implies that the Prize has been awarded for a long series of studies extending practically over my whole scientific life.

The problems of language here are really serious. We wish to speak in some way about the structure of the atoms. But we cannot speak about atoms in ordinary language.

Often it is the means that justify the ends: goals advance technique and technique survives even when goal structures crumble.