If you're going to immerse yourself in a project for three years, why not stake out a chunk of the world that is completely alien to you and go traveling?

Librarian is a service occupation. Gas station attendant of the mind.

Science is not about control. It is about cultivating a perpetual condition of wonder in the face of something that forever grows one step richer and subtler than our latest theory about it. It is about reverence, not mastery.

I don't mind arguing with myself. It's when I lose that it bothers me.

I really like science because it seems to be that place where you get the big picture, everything connects.

The use of music is to remind us how short a time we have a body.

Time passes, as the novelist says. The single most useful trick of fiction for our repair and refreshment: the defeat of time. A century of family saga and a ride up an escalator can take the same number of pages. Fiction sets any conversion rate, then changes it in a syllable. The narrator’s mother carries her child up the stairs and the reader follows, for days. But World War I passes in a paragraph. I needed 125 pages to get from Labor Day to Christmas vacation. In six more words, here’s spring.