I think the virtue I prize above all others is curiosity. If you look really hard at almost anybody, and try to see why they're doing what they're doing, taking a dig at them ceases to be what you want to do even if you hate them.

Ice burns, and it is hard to the warm-skinned to distinguish one sensation, fire, from the other, frost.

I think the virtue I prize above all others is curiosity.

Vocabularies are crossing circles and loops. We are defined by the lines we choose to cross or to be confined by.

A surprising number of people - including many students of literature - will tell you they haven't really lived in a book since they were children.

Never stop paying attention to things. Never make your mind up finally. Do not hold beliefs.

Once upon a time, when men and women hurtled through the air on metal wings, when they wore webbed feet and walked on the bottom of the sea, learning the speech of whales and the songs of the dolphins, when pearly-fleshed and jewelled apparitions of Texan herdsmen and houris shimmered in the dusk on Nicaraguan hillsides, when folk in Norway and Tasmania in dead of winter could dream of fresh strawberries, dates, guavas and passion fruits and find them spread next morning on their tables, there was a woman who was largely irrelevant, and therefore happy.