So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?

Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.

Time is a slippery thing: lose hold of it once, and its string might sail out of your hands forever.

To say a person is a happy person or an unhappy person is ridiculous. We are a thousand different kinds of people every hour.

My preference is for prose with more silence in it, language that contains more pockets of strangeness.

Watching teething babies is like watching over a thermonuclear reactor-it is best done in shifts, by well-rested people.

It's embarrassingly plain how inadequate language is.

Anyone who has spent a few nights in a tent during a storm can tell you: The world doesn't care all that much if you live or die.

Leave home, leave the country, leave the familiar. Only then can routine experience--buying bread, eating vegetables, even saying hello--become new all over again.

A real diamond is never perfect.

For me, writing historical fiction is all about finding a balance between reading, traveling, looking, imagining, and dreaming.

I cannot read my own words, Lest I shed a tear, For all the aching memories, That I hold so very dear.

Tell me the story about how the sun loved the moon so much that he died every night to let her breathe.

One may conceive light to spread successively, by spherical waves.

In this dark world, the Lord Jesus gave us the task of passing on His love

We wait for the fulfillment of our desires. We wait with hope, apathy, resignation, belief. We become despondent, elated. We wait

Every single American has a voice and ... it ought to be heard in the halls of power every day.

Advertising is the price you pay for unremakable thinking.

I don't mind walking. I always feel so sorry for women who don't like to walk; they miss so much--so many rare little glimpses of life; and we women learn so little of life on the whole.

We were asked to host the Pan African Parliament and we agreed to this.

I'm not the dumbest guy that ever lived.