“I think all tragedies are best told with some humor. You have to relieve the darkness to let the reader get through it. Also, that life has happiness and sadness mixed together.”

To that end, I believe that we should make room for both spiritual atheists and thinking believers.

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

As I understand it, a universe is a … well, a totality. A universe is everything that is, as far as the inside of the thing.

Each time is true, but the truths are not the same.

For my students who are trying to learn the craft of writing in a writing class – contemporary literature is what’s most useful.

If a person holds no ambitions in this world, he suffers unknowingly.

I have no opposition at all to technology. I think technology is a wonderful thing that has to be used thoughtfully, and we can’t just assume that every bit of new technology improvesthe quality of life; it’s really in how the technology is used.

The belief or disbelief in such a Being is therefore a matter of faith.

It’s exciting having a student who is not used to expressing their emotional side and bringing that out in them and see that developing and helping to nurture that.

I should have written books instead of reading them.

Continents of memory had been lost.

Faith is the ability to honor stillness at some moments, and at others to ride the passion and exuberance.

After a while the car becomes just another thing that he owns. Moreover, when his neighbor next door buys two cars, in an instant our man feels wretchedly poor and deprived.

In fiction writing ideas have to be handled extremely carefully.

I would think that you are more fluent with the rational. It has its appeal. But the irrational permits a greater exercise of … shall we say, power.

What I am very disturbed about is this trend of everything happening faster and faster and faster and there being more and more general noise in the world, and less and less time for quiet reflection on who we are, and where we’re going.

There is always some kid who may be seeing me for the first time. I owe him my best.

For the first time, as a family, they appeared to have an instinct of being in contact, with some strange and unsafe thing.

From his observations, he concluded that it [Tycho’s supernova] was not some kind of comet or a fiery meteor, whether these be generated beneath the Moon or above the Moon, but that it is a star shining in the firmament itself.

Because in some men it is in them to give up everything personal at some time, before it ferments and poisons–throw it to some human being or some human idea. They have to.

Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some of them woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.

There’s always some youngster coming up- they’ll find somebody.

Your look reflects what’s happening in your mind. You gotta have some swag to you.

You watch some teams these days and you wonder if they just met on the playground and decided to choose up sides.