Transience is what is normal. The problem is that we are busily trying to create political structures and cultural expressions that deny that and to deny that is to deny the basic idea of what is human.

I think massive migration is inevitable. As sea levels rise, as climate change happens, as fertile fields become arid, as wars are fought, people are going to move. They always have.

And with a last stardrop, a last circle, I arrive, and she's there, chemical wonder in her eyes.

America's strength has made it a sort of Gulliver in world affairs: By wiggling its toes it can, often inadvertently, break the arm of a Lilliputian.

There's a reason prophets perform miracles; language lacks the power to describe faith.

I don't want to be anxious on my day-to-day life. I want to try to imagine a future I'd like to live in and then write books and do things that, in my own small way, make it more likely that that future will come to exist.

Time is our most precious currency. So it's significant that we are being encouraged, wherever possible, to think of our attention not as expenditure but as consumption. This blurring of labor and entertainment forms the basis, for example, of the financial alchemy that conjures deca-billion-dollar valuations for social-networking companies.