You don't have to be an academic. You don't have to be anything. Don't force it. Feel your way, and don't stop feeling your way until something fits. Maybe nothing will. Maybe you are a road, not a destination. That is fine. Be a road. But make sure it's one with something to look at out of the window.
If you have children and love one more than another, work at it. They will know, even if it's by a single atom less. A single atom is all you need to make a very big explosion.
Humans are always doing things they don't like doing. In fact, to my best estimate, at any one time only point three percent of humans are actively doing something they like doing, and even when they do so, they feel an intense amount of guilt about it and are fervently promising themselves they'll be back doing something horrendously unpleasant very shortly.
[...] being human is being a young child on Christmas Day who receives and absolutely magnificent castle. And there is a perfect photograph of this castle on the box and you want more than anything to play with the castle and the knights and the princesses because it looks like such a perfect human world, but the only problem is that the castle isn't built. It's in tiny intricate pieces, and although there's a book of instructions you don't understand it. And nor can your parents or Aunt Sylvie. So you are just left, crying at the ideal castle on the box which no one would ever be able to build.
[...] this is the species whose main excuse for not doing something is 'if only I had more time'. Perfectly valid until you realise they do have more time. Not eternity, granted, but they have tomorrow. And the day after tomorrow. In fact, I would have to write 'the day after' thirty thousand times before a final 'tomorrow' in order to illustrate the amount of time on a human's hands.
[...] the whole of human history is full of people who tried against the odds. Some succeeded, most failed, but that hasn't stopped them. Whatever else you could say about these particular primates, they could be determined.
Nun, es ist merkwürdig, aber von einem Ereignis, das gut abläuft, und von Tagen, die man angenehm verbringt, ist rasch berichtet und da gibt's auch nicht viel drüber zu hören. Indessen lässt sich über unbequeme und aufregende, ja sogar schreckliche Ereignisse eine gute Geschichte erzählen, jedenfalls ist eine Menge drüber zu sagen.
That's always seemed so ridiculous to me, that people want to be around someone because they're pretty. It's like picking your breakfeast cereals based on color instead of taste.
Thomas Edison's last words were 'It's very beautiful over there'. I don't know where there is, but I believe it's somewhere, and I hope it's beautiful.
When adults say, "Teenagers think they are invincible" with that sly, stupid smile on their faces, they don't know how right they are. We need never be hopeless, because we can never be irreparably broken. We think that we are invincible because we are. We cannot be born, and we cannot die. Like all energy, we can only change shapes and sizes and manifestations. They forget that when they get old. They get scared of losing and failing. But that part of us greater than the sum of our parts cannot begin and cannot end, and so it cannot fail.
