“I prefer the earlier birth control techniques, which ranged from the delicious (using honey as a spermicide) to the aerobic (jumping backward seven times after coitus).”

The best we can do, to paraphrase Pollan, is to eat whole foods, mostly plants, and not too much.

After decimating several vegetables, I decide juicing is my favorite form of food preparation. There’s something perversely appealing about subjecting an innocent plant to that much violence.

A 2002 Oxford study showed counting sheep actually delays the onset of sleep. It’s just too dull to stop us from worrying about jobs and spouses.

How do you gag the voice in your head that says, ‘You don’t have to [do it] today. There’s always tomorrow.’?

Since I was relatively new to the Bible, I was surprised by the Old Testament God. He’s wrathful, but at other times, He’s incredibly compassionate. He’s not a one-dimensional figure at all.

Paintings! They’re like TV, but they don’t move.

Scrabble – The game is available in Braille. That’s a nice fact. This makes me feel better about humanity for some reason. I can’t really explain why.

I thought religion would eventually wither away and we’d all be worshiping at the altar of science.

Very few people changed the world by sitting on their couch.

It comes back to the old question: How can the Bible be so wise in some places and so barbaric in others? And why should we put any faith in a book that includes such brutality?

I know that knowledge and intelligence are not the same thing – but they do live in the same neighborhood. I know once again, firsthand, the joy of learning.

Giulia Melucci has written a wonderfully funny and moving book. It’s like Eat, Pray, Love, with recipes.

I have little shame, no dignity – all in the name of a better cause.

I don’t believe that prayers actually change God’s mind – if there is a God – but I liked praying for people in need. It was like moral weightlifting. I tend to be self-obsessed, and it was nice to get out of my brain once in a while.

Behavior shapes emotions.

Med students panic their first year when they learn all the diseases. It’s not until the second year that they learn the cures.

The idea which we so often hear expressed in the Western world, that’s how they are, that’s how they will always be and they can’t do anything else.

People have different ideas of who I am. And I think because I’m very private, people make up the strangest ideas of who and why and what.

The idea was to interpret science sensibly, with good proportion, good balance and good lighting, so we could understand it.

he U.S. celebrates political dissent and the right for people to argue free from violence about places or ideas that are in conflict.

I was a child then, I had no idea what the world would be like. I wished to trust myself on the waters and the sea.

Getting an idea for a book is not the problem, but you need 300 ideas – an idea a page.

I wonder where you got that idea from? I mean, the idea that it’s feeble to change your mind once it’s made up. That’s a wrong idea, you know.

When I began to think about the head of the family, the storyteller, the rise of television which became the new storyteller, the break-up of the American family as an idea and then Avalon came.