The air is crowded with birds -- beautiful, tender, intelligent birds -- to whom life is a song.
You learn a lot, writing fiction.
We open our mouths and out flow words whose ancestries we do not even know. We are walking lexicons. In a single sentence of idle chatter we preserve Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Norse: we carry a museum inside our heads, each day we commemorate peoples of whom we have never heard.
It seems to me that anyone whose library consists of a Kindle lying on a table is some sort of bloodless nerd.
We all need a past - that's where our sense of identity comes from.
The idea that memory is linear is nonsense. What we have in our heads is a collection of frames. As to time itself-can it be linear when all these snatches of other presents exist at once in your mind? A very elusive and tricky concept, time.
The day is refracted, and the next and the one after that, all of them broken up into a hundred juggled segments, each brilliant and self-contained so that the hours are no longer linear but assorted like bright sweets in a jar.
When we undertake to cover our sins,. . . behold, the heavens withdraw themselves; the Spirit of the Lord is grieved; and when it is withdrawn, Amen to the priesthood or the authority of that man
Let's keep in mind that Donald Trump didn't win because of himself. He won in spite of himself. A quarter of his voters voted for Donald Trump believing he wasn't presidential and he didn't have the temperament, but they had hope that he would grow into the office and become more presidential. That doesn't seem to have happened, and I don't think it will happen for a 71-year-old man.
Whatever is done for men takes away from the stimulus and necessity of doing things for themselves. The value of legislative as an agent in human advancement has been much over-estimated. No laws, however stringent, can make the idle industrious, the thriftless provident or the drunken sober.
A lot of parents ask me how to get kids to eat more vegetables. The first thing I say is that it starts from the top.