You only have to believe that you can succeed, that you can be whatever your heart desires, be willing to work for it, and you can have it.
I still think we are smart enough to not destroy planet Earth, our only home.
I started as - well, I wanted to be Poet Laureate. And I wanted to be a naturalist. That's how I began. I didn't have any desire to go and be a scientist. Louis Leakey channeled me there. I'm delighted he did. I love science. I love analyzing and making sense of all these observations. So, it was the perfect rounding off of who I was into who I am.
It's the bond between mother and child, which is really for us and for chimps and other primates, the root of all the expressions of social behavior.
It was both fascinating and appalling to learn that chimpanzees were capable of hostile and territorial behavior that was not unlike certain forms of primitive human warfare.
There isn't a sharp line dividing humans from the rest of the animal kingdom. All the time, we find animals doing things that, in our arrogance, we thought were just human.
From my perspective, I absolutely believe in a greater spiritual power, far greater than I am, from which I have derived strength in moments of sadness or fear. That's what I believe, and it was very, very strong in the forest.
A lot of people think that they are really cool because they don't outline. In my writing group, they would say, "I will never outline. I let the characters take me. " C'mon, man - I outline the story, but it's only like one page. It's a list of possible reversals in the story, like things where everything will just change because of this certain reveal or this certain action. Then I start really digging into the character because, to me, I don't care what the story is.
A pair of werewolves occupied another booth. They were eating raw shanks of lamb and arguing about who would win in a fight: Dumbledore from Harry Potter books or Magnus Bane. "Dumbledore would totally win," said the first one. "He has the badass Killing Curse. " The second lycanthrope made a trenchant point. "But Dumbledore isn't real. " "I don't think Magnus Bane is real either," scoffed the first. "Have you ever met him?" "This is so weird," said Clary, slinking down in her seat. "Are you listening to them?" "No. It's rude to eavesdrop," said Jace.
The heart, in its journey to Allah, Majestic is He, is like that of a bird; Love is its head, and fear and hope are its two wings. When the head and two wings are sound, the bird flies gracefully; if the head is severed, the bird dies; if the bird loses one of its wings, it then becomes a target for every hunter or predator.
Rereading Candide, I was struck by the link between optimism and the optimal, the idea that we have been placed in this optimal world rather than some other.