Southerners have many fine qualities, charm and civility among them, and a sense of the tragic.

She says what holds their marriage together is that she feels too damn sorry for him to ask for a divorce.

In the end, it's all about perseverance.

Wealth is power, and power is the only thing about which contemporary culture cares.

The human imagination may be the most elastic thing in the universe, stretching to encompass the millions of dreams that in centuries of relectless struggle built modern civilization, to entertain the endless doubts that hamper every human enterprise, and to conceive the vast menagerie of boogeymen that trouble every human heart.

As an adult I discovered that I was a pretty good autodidact, and can teach myself all kind of things. And developed a great interest in a number of different things from how to build a street hot rod from the ground up to quantum mechanics, and those two different kinds of mechanics, and it was really in the sciences, quantum mechanics, molecular biology, I would begin looking at these things looking for ideas, but in fact you don't read it for ideas you read it for curiosity and interest in the subject.

Inaction counted as a choice.