The literature of the emperor penguin is as forbidding, as inaccessible, as the frozen heart of Antarctica itself. Its beauties may be unearthly, but they are not for us.

You sit down and you do it, and you do it, and you do it, until you have learned to do it.

Fiction—and poetry and drama— cleanse the doors of perception.

She'll die.' 'Aye. That's a consequence of being alive.

All makers must leave room for the acts of the spirit. But they have to work hard and carefully, and wait patiently, to deserve them.

Living, being in the world, was a much greater and stranger thing than she had ever dreamed.

What the brain does by itself is infinitely more fascinating and complex than any response it can make to chemical stimulation.