How can love’s spaciousnessbe conveyed in the narrowconfines of one syllable?
Wonder is the heaviest element on the periodic table. Even a tiny fleck of it stops time.
Listen, I’d rather lie naked in a plowed field under an incontinent horse for a week than have to read that paragraph again!
For me, life offers so many complexly appealing moments that two beautiful objects may be equally beautiful for different reasons and at different times. How can one choose?
Who would deduce the dragonfly from the larva, the iris from the bud, the lawyer from the infant? …We are all shape-shifters and magical reinventors. Life is really a plural noun, a caravan of selves.
Devising a vocabulary for gardening is like devising a vocabulary for sex. There are the correct Latin names, but most people invent euphemisms. Those who refer to plants by Latin name are considered more expert, if a little pedantic.
Alligators have beautiful undulating skin, which feels dense, spongy, solid, like the best eraser.
Couples are jigsaw puzzles that hang together by touching in just enough points. They’re never total fits or misfits. … We marry children who have grown up and still rejoice in being children …. [p. 15]
For if I do something, I never do it thoughtlessly.
It began in mystery and it will end in mystery, but what a rare and beautiful country lies in between.
Suffering took hold of me like a magic spell abolishing all differences between friends and strangers.
It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between.
Still, though no one is an island, most are peninsulas. Our lives wouldn’t make sense without personal memories pinned like butterflies against the velvet backdrop of social history.
Why was it, she asked herself, that “animals can sometimes subdue their predatory ways in only a few months, while humans, despite centuries of refinement, can quickly grow more savage than any beast?
As fleeting emotions stalk it, a face can leak fear or the guilt of a forming lie.
Much more. We’re joined at the heart.””Bad luck for you, I’m afraid. My ticker’s pretty wonky.””Too much boozing.”His eyes twinkled, and he drew me close. “Not enough kissling.
Knee-deep in the cosmic overwhelm, I’m strickenby the ricochet wonder of it all: the plaineverythingness of everything, in cahootswith the everythingness of everything else.- From Diffraction (for Carl Sagan)
I don’t want to get to the end of my life and find that I lived just the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.
Nothing is more memorable than a smell. One scent can be unexpected, momentary and fleeting, yet conjure up a childhood summer beside a lake in the mountains.
Hurricane season brings a humbling reminder that, despite our technologies, most of nature remains unpredictable.
Artificial intelligence is growing up fast, as are robots whose facial expressions can elicit empathy and make your mirror neurons quiver.
Love is the best school, but the tuition is high and the homework can be painful.
I’m fascinated how often and with what whole-heartedness people will risk their lives to perform acts of courage, sacrifice, and compassion for total strangers.
Living with anyone for many years takes skill. To keep peace in the household, couples learn to adapt to one another, hopefully in positive ways.
Even without seeing the crickets, grasshoppers, cicadas and katydids, we hear them shrilling in this season and trust that they’re the tiny living gargoyles entomologists claim.
All relationships change the brain – but most important are the intimate bonds that foster or fail us, altering the delicate circuits that shape memories, emotions and that ultimate souvenir, the self.
I’ve always loved scuba diving and the cell-tickling feel of being underwater, though it poses unique frustrations. Alone, but with others, you may share the same sights and feelings, but you can’t communicate well.