“She thougt of sunrise over the library slope at Cornell University that nobody out on it had seen because the slope faces west.”

It all comes down, as it must, to the desires of individual men. Oh, and women too of course, bless their empty little heads.

She may know a little, may think of herself, face and body, as ‘pretty’ but he could never tell her all the rest, how many other living things, birds, nights smelling of grass and rain, sunlit moments of simple peace, also gather in what she is to him.

If patterns of ones and zeros were ‘like’ patterns of human lives and death, if everything about an individual could be represented in a computer record by a long string of ones and zeros, then what kind of creature would be represented by a long string of lives and deaths?

Perhaps its familiarity rendered it temporarily invisible to you.

A screaming comes across the sky.

What are the stars but points in the body of God where we insert the healing needles of our terror and longing?

There was no difference between the behavior of a god and the operations of pure chance.

They plot, they plot, sleeping or afoot they never let up.

What sort of an age is this where a man becomes one’s enemy only when his back is turned?

Get too conceptual, too cute and remote, and your characters die on the page.

Someday it’ll all be done by machine. Information machines.

The reality is in this head. Mine. I’m the projector at the planetarium, all the closed little universe visible in the circle of that stage is coming out of my mouth, eyes, and sometimes other orifices also.

Real flight and dreams of flight go together. Both are part of the same movement. Not A before B, but all together.

You go from dream to dream inside me. You have passage to my last shabby corner, and there, among the debris, you’ve found life. I’m no longer sure which of all the words, images, dreams or ghosts are ‘yours’ and which are ‘mine.’ It’s past sorting out.

Like so many named places in California it was less an identifiable city than a grouping of concepts–census tracts, special purpose bond-issue districts, shopping nuclei, all overlaid with access roads to its own freeway.

Let me be unambiguous. I prefer not to be photographed.

We have a president, who I think is a nice guy, but he spent too much time at Harvard, perhaps.

Opportunity expands when there is excellence and choice in education, when taxes are lowered, when every citizen has affordable, portable health insurance and when constitutional freedoms are preserved.

Until we reach equality in education, we can’t reach equality in the larger society.

Petting is the study of the anatomy in braille.

Common sense is seeing things as they are; and doing things as they ought to be.

The lessons one learns at school are not always the ones the school thinks it’s teaching.

Education is the investment our generation makes in the future.

I pledge to you today that as president, in my first budget, I will introduce the largest increase in special education ever.