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"What is the difference between a cathedral and a physics lab? Are not they both saying: Hello? We spy on whales and on interstellar radio objects we starve ourselves and pray till we're blue."
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"Curiosity, boldness, and persistence help you to be a success."

"Why is a carrot more orange than an orange?"

"Women never stalk men, they just research them intensely."

"Why does anybody do anything?" Mimi asked impatiently. "Most of the time we don't know--any of us."
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"I smelled silt on the wind, turkey, laundry, leaves . . . my God what a world. There is no accounting for one second of it (267)."


"Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles."


"I was in no tent under leaves, sleepless and glad. There was no moon at all; along the world's coasts the sea tides would be springing strong. The air itself also has lunar tides; I lay still. Could I feel in the air an invisible sweep and surge, and an answering knock in the lungs? Or could I feel the starlight? Every minute on a square mile of this land one ten thousandth of an ounce of starlight spatters to earth. What percentage of an ounce did that make on my eyes and cheeks and arms, tapping and nudging as particles, pulsing and stroking as waves?"


"It has always been a happy thought to me that the creek runs on all night, new every minute, whether I wish it or know it or care, as a closed book on a shelf continues to whisper to itself its own inexhaustible tale."


"The writer studies literature, not the world. He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write."


"I woke in bits, like all children, piecemeal over the years. I discovered myself and the world, and forgot them, and discovered them again."


"So it is that a writer writes many books. In each book, he intended several urgent and vivid points, many of which he sacrificed as the book's form hardened."


"Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark."


"Aim for the chopping block. If you aim for the wood, you will have nothing. Aim past the wood, aim through the wood; aim for the chopping block."
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