You know, people talk about this being an uncertain time. You know, all time is uncertain. I mean, it was uncertain back in – in 2007, we just didn’t know it was uncertain. It was – uncertain on September 10th, 2001. It was uncertain on October 18th, 1987, you just didn’t know it.

There are three classes of people: those who see, those who see when they are shown, those who do not see.

What I have is a malevolent curiosity. That’s what drives my need to write and what probably leads me to look at things a little askew. I do tend to take a different perspective from most people.

Everything can change at any moment, suddenly and forever.

Kids will remind you that, even though you’ve gone down a road 100 times, it’s brand new for them – and that’s healthy.

Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute.

How much easier it is to be critical than to be correct.

Life is a constant oscillation between the sharp horns of dilemmas.

My justification is that most people my age spend a lot of time thinking about what they’re going to do for the next five or ten years. The time they spend thinking about their life, I just spend drinking.

When in doubt, don’t.

We can be thankful to a friend for a few acres, or a little money; and yet for the freedom and command of the whole earth, and for the great benefits of our being, our life, health, and reason, we look upon ourselves as under no obligation.

The fight against AIDS in China is already well underway. The Chinese government and other funders are providing major support, and they’ll continue to bear primary responsibility for delivering prevention and treatment.

Ask an older person you respect to tell you his or her greatest regret.

Against my will, in the course of my travels, the belief that everything worth knowing was known at Cambridge gradually wore off. In this respect my travels were very useful to me.

I’m astounded by people who want to ‚know‘ the universe when it’s hard enough to find your way around Chinatown.

I’m more of a realist when it comes to life, and I’d much rather my mother be in a spiritual place in Heaven than in a bed, sick, fighting for her life.

A hustler has to deal with danger and risk. It’s part of the game. You cannot control it all, nor would you want to. Chaos, unknown factors are not something to be anxious about.

I’m not somebody that thinks about destiny and fate, but I don’t walk away from it when something unfolds.

I actually feel like women in my position, when we have all at our disposal to help us, shouldn’t complain when we consider all of the people who are really struggling and don’t have the means or support. Many people are single, raising children. That’s hard.

My kind of composing is more like the work of a gardener. The gardener takes his seeds and scatters them, knowing what he is planting but not quite what will grow where and when – and he won’t necessarily be able to reproduce it again afterwards either.

It’s a funny old world.

The uncertainty of parenting can bring up feelings in us that range from frustration to terror.

We view things not only from different sides, but with different eyes; we have no wish to find them alike.

Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, ‚But how can it be like that?‘ because you will get ‚down the drain,‘ into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that.

When I was a boy we didn’t wake up with Vietnam and have Cyprus for lunch and the Congo for dinner.

There is no unique picture of reality.

Love is a trap. When it appears, we see only its light, not its shadows.

Men often oppose a thing merely because they have had no agency in planning it, or because it may have been planned by those whom they dislike.

Why does your mind conform? Have you ever asked? Are you aware that you are conforming to a pattern? It doesn’t matter what that pattern is, whether you have established a pattern for yourself or it has been established for you.

What one fool can understand, another can.

Truths and roses have thorns about them.

As long as poverty, injustice and gross inequality persist in our world, none of us can truly rest.

Would you bet your paycheck on a weather forecast for tomorrow? If not, then why should this country bet billions on global warming predictions that have even less foundation?

He who has not the spirit of this age, has all the misery of it.

There is no security on this earth; there is only opportunity.

I like gaps; all my stories have gaps. It seems this is the way people’s lives present themselves.

The greatness of man is great in that he knows himself to be wretched. A tree does not know itself to be wretched.

Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but sometimes, playing a poor hand well.

Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories – and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.

Any concern too small to be turned into a prayer is too small to be made into a burden.

You are 27 or 28 right? It is very tough to live at that age. When nothing is sure. I have sympathy with you.

Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong.

Depression runs in my family on both sides, and I have to be wary.

I’m never a reliable narrator, unbiased or objective.

It’s so hard to know what to do when one wishes earnestly to do right.

The bad fortune of the good turns their faces up to heaven; the good fortune of the bad bows their heads down to the earth.

Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.

Necessity is not an established fact, but an interpretation.

It’s hard to wrap my head around the fact that there are people who can’t or won’t see what Black Lives Matter is trying to accomplish.

Men freely believe that which they desire.

A lot of us grow up and we grow out of the literal interpretation that we get when we’re children, but we bear the scars all our life. Whether they’re scars of beauty or scars of ugliness, it’s pretty much in the eye of the beholder.

I set up situations that involve abandoning control and finding out what happens.

Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it.

If you think nobody cares about you, try missing a couple of payments.

We cannot wish for that we know not.

When it comes to life the critical thing is whether you take things for granted or take them with gratitude.

People are unaware of what is going on. When I talk to people, they know the basics, they know the planet is warming because of greenhouse gases… but they don’t know the actual consequence of that.

There is no hope unmingled with fear, and no fear unmingled with hope.

The honest poor can sometimes forget poverty. The honest rich can never forget it.

Although our intellect always longs for clarity and certainty, our nature often finds uncertainty fascinating.

It’s the niceties that make the difference fate gives us the hand, and we play the cards.