I've always seen the world through the eyes of a scientist. I love the predictable outcomes that science gives us, the control over the world that that can render.

Be still, and the world is bound to turn herself inside out to entertain you. Everywhere you look, joyful noise is clanging to drown out quiet desperation.

I attempted briefly to consecrate myself in the public library, believing every crack in my soul could be chinked with a book.

Morality is not a large, constructed *thing* you have or have not, but simply a capacity. Something you carry with you in your brain and in your hands.

What a writer can do, what a fiction writer or a poet or an essay writer can do is re-engage people with their own humanity.

To people who think of themselves as God's houseguests, American enterprise must seem arrogant beyond belief. Or stupid. A nation of amnesiacs, proceeding as if there were no other day but today. Assuming the land could also forget what had been done to it.

All of the promises of politicians, generals, madmen, and crusaders that war can create peace have yet to be borne out.