Both men lost speech in their last days and hours. Both died at age sixty-three, Lee long since weary of life, and Grant ready to live it again. Their war made them national icons, and their war reput...

Because we are human we have a long childhood, and one of the jobs of that childhood is to sculpt our brains. We have years--about twelve of them--to draw outlines of the shape we want our sculpted br...

As the carriage whipped forward, they passed the alley she had spent so many days staring at—it was there, and then gone as they careened around a corner, nearly knocking over a costermonger pushing a...

Life is like a ten speed bicycle. Most of us have gears we never use.

Most of us cluster somewhere in the middle of most statistical distributions. But there are lots of bell curves, and pretty much everyone is on a tail of at least one of them. We may collect strange m...

Cheerfulness, sir, is the principle ingredient in the composition of health.

Once upon a time, they say, there was a girl...there was a boy...there was a person who was in trouble. And this is what she did...and what he did...and how they learned to survive it. This is what th...

A drop of water is not immortal; it can be resolved into oxygen and hydrogen. If, therefore, a drop of water were to maintain that it had a quality of aqueousness which would survive its dissolution w...

A few years after working on Mauna Kea, I discovered that I had radiation sickness

Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president or any other public official, save exactly to the degree in which he himself stands by the country. It is patriotic...

1. God is (by definition) a being than which no greater being can be thought.2. Greatness includes greatness of virtue.3. Therefore, God is a being than which no being could be more virtuous.4. But vi...

The shrewd, like chameleons, embrace change by using it to their advantage.

America is still AmeriKKKa. rather we like it or not

Being present is being connected to All Things.

Western governments use thermal heating standards for public protection from the damaging effects of wireless radio frequency (RF) radiation. Eastern governments use biological standards that are much...

(William) Deresiewicz offers a vision of what it takes to move from adolescence to adulthood. Everyone is born with a mind, he writes, but it is only through introspection, observation, connecting the...

Working for OSHA is a horrible job to have. You have to ignore the whistle blowers and send them illegal letters saying that you cannot find any problems. I have a lot of those fraudulent letters, as...

Arrogance is a map of a road that leads to bridges that are out.

Don't think about the writing process too much. Just do one thing: tell the motherfucking story.

Do not injure, abuse, oppress, enslave, insult, torment, torture, or kill any creature or living being.