I'd seen a great many partial eclipses, but a partial eclipse has the same relation to a total eclipse as flirting with a man does to marrying him. It's completely different.

I had good innings, as the British say. I wrote for 38 years at the top of my form, and I wanted to quit on a high note.

Our life seems cursed to be a wiggle merely, and a wandering without end.

Doing something does not require discipline. It creates its own discipline - with a little help from caffeine.

What I call innocence is the spirit's unself-conscious state at any moment of pure devotion to any object. It is at once a receptiveness and total concentration.

No one escapes the wilderness on the way to the promised land.

Nature seems to exult in abounding radicality, extremism, anarchy. If we were to judge nature by its common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe the world existed. In nature, improbabilities are the one stock in trade. The whole creation is one lunatic fringe. ... No claims of any and all revelations could be so far-fetched as a single giraffe.