As the universe accepted our show, more people began to accept me.
I share my name with an aerobatic bird that can whiz across a whole summer sky in seconds. A swift is so equipped for speed that it can scarcely cope with being stationary.
That's the way it is: life inculdes a lot of empty space. We are one-tenth living tissue, nine-tenths water; life is one-tenth Here and Now, nine-tenths a history lesson. For most of the time the Here and Now is neither now nor here.
The real art is not to come up with extraordinary clever words but to make ordinary simple words do extraordinary things. To use the language that we all use and to make amazing things occur.
Happiness quells thought. And work quells thought.
As a novelist, I suppose I can say that I'm highly articulate. But I know, as a person, in other ways, I'm not always articulate. I think we are all, from time to time, inarticulate, at some level, about some things.
Children, only animals live entirely in the Here and Now. Only nature knows neither memory nor history. But man - let me offer you a definition - is the storytelling animal. Wherever he goes he wants to leave behind not a chaotic wake, not an empty space, but the comforting marker-buoys and trail-signs of stories. He has to go on telling stories. He has to keep on making them up. As long as there's a story, it's all right. Even in his last moments, it's said, in the split second of a fatal fall - or when he's about to drown - he sees, passing rapidly before him, the story of his whole life.
The political face of Europe is one that has said very clearly that it wants cooperation and friendship with the United States.
No matter how many times you save the world, it always manages to get back in jeopardy again.
We think we're doing it all. But the animals are doing the real work of holding it all together, and keeping us on our path. As are the plants. It's as if we think the stars and sun and moon and the earth itself aren't doing any work. It's as if we think that all of nature is unintelligent except for us.
Children of heroes have glory for breakfast.