Science is not about control. It is about cultivating a perpetual condition of wonder in the face of something that forever grows one step richer and subtler than our latest theory about it. It is about reverence, not mastery.
science wonder wonders
It had to be U. U. was the only town I could still bear, the one spot in the atlas I'd already absorbed head-on. When you take too many of your critical hits in one place, that place can no longer hurt you.
home place
Speech baffled my machine. Helen made all well-formed sentences. But they were hollow and stuffed--linguistic training bras. She sorted nouns from verbs, but, disembodied, she did not know the difference between thing and process, except as they functioned in clauses. Her predications were all shotgun weddings. Her ideas were as decorative as half-timber beams that bore no building load.She balked at metaphor. I felt the annoyance of her weighted vectors as they readjusted themselves, trying to accommodate my latest caprice. You're hungry enough to eat a horse. A word from a friend ties your stomach in knots. Embarrassment shrinks you, amazement strikes you dead. Wasn't the miracle enough? Why do humans need to say everything in speech's stockhouse except what they mean?
metaphor the-stuff-of-thought
Librarian is a service occupation. Gas station attendant of the mind.
librarians
I think that if the novel's task is to describe where we find ourselves and how we live now, the novelist must take a good, hard look at the most central facts of contemporary life - technology and science.
science technology tso-life
A book is still atemporal. It is you, in silence, hearing voices in your head, unfolding at a time that has nothing to do with the timescale of reading. And for the hours that we retreat into this moratorium, with the last form of private and silent human activity that isn't considered pathological, we are outside of time.
reading silence thetimes time
I used to work for 12 or 14 hours at a time but the digital age has made such happy immersions almost impossible.
age thetimes time work
I'd like, each time out as a writer, to reinvent who I am and what I'm doing. That's one of the great pleasures and rewards of the occupation.
occupations thetimes time
This idea that a book can either be about character and feeling, or about politics and idea, is just a false binary. Ideas are an expression of the feelings and the intense emotions we hold about the world.
character emotions politics
We will live with racism for ever. But senses of self, senses of belonging, senses of us and of others? Those are up for grabs.
self
I really like science because it seems to be that place where you get the big picture, everything connects.
places science
I would say the flip side to my fascination with systems is a fascination with components. So many of my books are dialogues between little and big.
system
What we can do should never by itself determine what we choose to do, yet this is the way technology tends to work.
technology work
I write the way you might arrange flowers. Not every try works, but each one launches another. Every constraint, even dullness, frees up a new design.
design work
Only white men have the luxury of ignoring race.
luxury men race