“You might think of the barrier between fiction and reality as being a bit like a blood-brain barrier, which allows only some kinds of molecules to pass from the bloodstream into the brain. Emotions...”

“No other species flees from boredom with as much urgency as we do. We are far more eager to do brain work than we are to do physical labor.”

“As the unexpected becomes ordinary, the spotlight shifts once again to land where your brain thinks it will get more informational bang for the attentional buck.”

“Words in the head are sticky and social creatures when you finally pull one out, you're liable to get lots of bits of meanings that have rubbed onto them as a result of their palling around with o...”

“The thing about language is that once you start getting analytical about it, you can't stop.”

“Every question was also an opportunity to create an impression that would guide how all subsequent answers to questions got interpreted.”

“Blood memory is described as our ancestral (genetic) connection to our language, songs, spirituality, and teachings. It is the good feeling that we experience when we are near these things.”

“The more serious about gardening I became, the more dubious lawns seemed. The problem for me was not, as it was for my father, the relation to my neighbors that a lawn implied; it was the lawns rel...”

“We having so much fun together!! 'through nature..through people..through religion...through culture..through friendship...we manage to learn something that lead to a better relationship among huma...”

“An intellectual snob is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture and not think of The Lone Ranger. ”

“If one cannot learn from the mistakes of others, one might as well become a Democrat.”

“I love pop culture -- the Rolling Stones, the Doors, David Lynch, things like that. That's why I said I don't like elitism.”

“We are looking for a tongue that speaks with reverence for life, searching for an ecology of mind. Without it, we have no home, no place of our own within the creation. It is not only the vocabular...”

“But Sasha was from Russia, where the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden and sentences are often left unfinished from doubt as how to best end them.”

“Why the Egyptian, Arabic, Abyssinian, Choctaw? Well, what tongue does the wind talk? What nationality is a storm? What country do rains come from? What color is lightning? Where does thunder goe wh...”