The statistics of life out there and the statistics of intelligent beings and advanced civilization is a certainty, the way I look at it. It has not been accepted, because we've been in an anthropocentric era.

The way you remember the past depends upon your hope for the future.

I came from an extraordinarily dysfunctional family, full of abuse and alcoholism. And eventually everyone within the family had committed suicide.

There really isn't a time to pause and have a celebration. I feel so serious about the whole thing.

Poetry is its own medium; it's very different than writing prose. Poetry can talk in an imagistic sense; it has particular ways of catching an environment.

The way you remember the past depends upon your hope for the future. And if what you see in your future has no hope, it has no potential, then you view the past that brought you to here as not very good.

I’m not a risk taker. But astronauts are professionals, so you get out on the field and play ball. I tried to take it in stride because that’s what I had to do to get into space. That’s where I belong, and I’m pretty good at it.