Learning to let go should be learned before learning to get. Life should be touched, not strangled.

They crashed the front door and grabbed at a woman, though she was not running, she was not trying to escape. She was only standing, weaving from side to side, her eyes fixed upon a nothingness in the wall as if they had struck her a terrible blow upon the head. Her tongue was moving in her mouth, and her eyes seemed to be trying to remember something, and then they remembered and her tongue moved again: "Play the man, Master Ridley; we shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.

Your mind's always juggling, isn't it?-mirrors, torches, plates.

Science is no more than an investigation of a miracle we can never explain, and art is an interpretation of that miracle.

Every story I've written was written because I had to write it. Writing stories is like breathing for me; it is my life.

I’m really alive! he thought. I never knew it before, or if I did I don’t remember!

He glanced back at the wall. How like a mirror, too, her face. Impossible; for how many people did you know who reflected your own light to you? People were more often--he searched for a simile, found one in his work--torches, blazing away until they whiffed out. How rarely did other people's faces take of you and throw back to you your own expression, your own innermost trembling thought?