The mode of consciousness of nonhuman species is quite different from human consciousness.

(I)f we are going to be kind, let it be out of simple generosity, not because we fear guilt or retribution.

The writers who have the deepest influence on one are those one reads in ones more impressionable, early life, and often it is the more youthful works of those writers that leave the deepest imprint.

When all else fails, philosophize.

We must cultivate, all of us, a certain ignorance, a certain blindness, or society will not be tolerable.

I know somewhat too much; and from this knowledge, once one has been infected, there seems to be no recovering.

All creatures come into the world bringing with them the memory of justice.

But he cannot see a connection between the end of yearning and the end of poetry. Is that what growing up amounts to: growing out of yearning, of passion, of all intensities of the soul?

I don't think we are ready to die, any of us, not without being escorted.

A book should be an axe to chop open the frozen sea inside us.

Become major, Paul. Live like a hero. That's what the classics teach us. Be a main character. Otherwise what is life for?

I wish I could fly like that hawk, rising and falling with the still spaces in the air, far above all this sickness and death and evil.

And I'm okay with drowning.

Empathy means realizing no trauma has discrete edges. Trauma bleeds.

Show people tend to treat their finances like their dentistry. They assume the man handling it knows what he is doing.

There is a lot of silence in watching somebody trying to remember things.

I get the picture better than anybody.

Never give anyone the advice to buy or sell shares, because the most benevolent price of advice can turn out badly.

Basketball is a pretty simple game. What wins is consistency and competitiveness.

The formula for doing a good job in photography is to think like a poet.

This fertilized ovum, known as a zygote, is a large diploid cell that is the beginning, or primordium, of a human being.