“The world is outside us; our senses are within us. How, then, do the two come together so that we can know something? Obviously our senses can't go forth and drag an actual chunk if the world back ...”

“knowledge is conventionally viewed as belief plus a bunch of credentials”

“Reliance on other people's knowledge. . . . buys us all a lot of time. It also buys us, in essence, many billions of prosthetic brains.”

“Doubt is the act of challenging our beliefs. . . . This is an active, investigative doubt: the kind that inspires us to wander onto shaky limbs or out into left field; the kind that doesn't divide ...”

“If imagination is what enables us to conceive of and enjoy stories other than our own, and if empathy is the act of taking other peoples stories seriously, certainty deadens or destroys both qualit...”

“To err is to wander and wandering is the way we discover the world and lost in thought it is the also the way we discover ourselves. Being right might be gratifying but in the end it is static a me...”

“He wanted to heat up the truth, to make it burn so hot that you would feel exactly what he felt.”

“Make up a story... For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don't tell us what to believe, what to fear. Sh...”

“Tell the story as if it were only of interest to the small circle of your characters, of which you may be one. There is no other way to put life into the story.”