The truth. It is a beautiful and terrible thing, and must therefore be treated with great caution.
There is nowhere you can go and only be with people who are like you. Give it up.
I came out of the Civil Rights Movement, and I had a different kind of focus than most people who have just the academic background as their primary training experience
The Smithsonian Festival of American Folklife, actually, was an effort to put something on the mall in Washington so American tourists could walk through America, and in their minds everything on the mall would be American
I went to a church where you could not sing out loud in the service until you had been saved
If I had been at a University I don't think I would have been able to have the experience I had in my Smithsonian work. I don't think I have been as successful
I just don't think one person has that much to contribute to any subject
Know that the eradication of the identification with the body is charity, spiritual austerity and ritual sacrifice; it is virtue, divine union and devotion; it is heaven, wealth, peace and truth; it is grace; it is the state of divine silence; it is the deathless death; it is jnana, renunciation, final liberation and bliss.
I think that anyone who grew up reading and being taught the Bible, as I did, can't help but have their prose shaped by it later in life. I still have deep, almost primal responses to the language of scripture, and I think that comes through in all my writing.
Hey, look at this!" He holds up a glistening, perfect pearl about the size of a pea. "You know, if you put enough pressure on coal it turns to pearls," he says earnestly to Finnick. "No, it doesn't," says Finnick dismissively. But I crack up, remembering that's how a clueless Effie Trinket presented us to the people of the Capitol last year, before anyone knew us. As coal pressured into pearls by our weighty existence. Beauty that arose out of pain.
To understand a science it is necessary to know its history.