A poem records emotions and moods that lie beyond normal language, that can only be patched together and hinted at metaphorically.

Look in the mirror. The face that pins you with its double gaze reveals a chastening secret.

It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between.

Success produces success, just as money produces money.

Touch seems to be as essential as sunlight.

Everyone admits that love is wonderful and necessary, yet no one agrees on just what it is.

I don't want to be a passenger in my own life.

I don't want to get to the end of my life and find that I lived just the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.

Nothing is more memorable than a smell. One scent can be unexpected, momentary and fleeting, yet conjure up a childhood summer beside a lake in the mountains.

A poem records emotions and moods that lie beyond normal language, that can only be patched together and hinted at metaphorically.

We live on the leash of our senses.

All relationships change the brain - but most important are the intimate bonds that foster or fail us, altering the delicate circuits that shape memories, emotions and that ultimate souvenir, the self.

Artificial intelligence is growing up fast, as are robots whose facial expressions can elicit empathy and make your mirror neurons quiver.

As people flock to urban centers where ground space is limited, cities with green walls and roofs and skyscraper farms offer improved health and well-being, renewable resources, reliable food supply, and relief to the environment.

As the most social apes, we inhabit a mirror-world in which every important relationship, whether with spouse, friend or child, shapes the brain, which in turn shapes our relationships.

Cicadas, buckling and unbuckling their stomach muscles, yield the sound of someone sharpening scissors. Fall field crickets, the thermometer hounds, add high-pitched tinkling chirps to the jazz, and their call quickens with warm weather, slows again with cool.

Even without seeing the crickets, grasshoppers, cicadas and katydids, we hear them shrilling in this season and trust that they're the tiny living gargoyles entomologists claim.

For better or worse, zoos are how most people come to know big or exotic animals. Few will ever see wild penguins sledding downhill to sea on their bellies, giant pandas holding bamboo lollipops in China or tree porcupines in the Canadian Rockies, balled up like giant pine cones.

Hurricane season brings a humbling reminder that, despite our technologies, most of nature remains unpredictable.

I've always loved scuba diving and the cell-tickling feel of being underwater, though it poses unique frustrations. Alone, but with others, you may share the same sights and feelings, but you can't communicate well.

In the winter, I enjoy cross-country skiing and raising orchids and amaryllises. If I could grow tropical flowers as perennials, I would, especially hibiscus and mandavilla.

Living with anyone for many years takes skill. To keep peace in the household, couples learn to adapt to one another, hopefully in positive ways.

Love is the best school, but the tuition is high and the homework can be painful.

Nature is more like a seesaw than a crystal, a never-ending conga line of bold moves and corrections.

The further we distance ourselves from the spell of the present, explored by our senses, the harder it will be to understand and protect nature's precarious balance, let alone the balance of our own human nature.

The simple, stupefying truth that, as a woman, I am a minute ocean, in the dark tropic of whose womb eggs lay coded as roe, floating in the sea that wet-nursed us all, moved me deeply.

We ogle plants and animals up close on television, the Internet and in the movies. We may not worship the animals we see, but we still regard them as necessary physical and spiritual companions. Technological nature can't completely satisfy that yearning.

We tend to think of heroes only in terms of violent combat, whether it's against enemies or a natural disaster. But human beings also perform radical acts of compassion; we just don't talk about them, or we don't talk about them as much.

We're losing biodiversity globally at an alarming rate, and we need a cornucopia of different plants and animals, for the planet's health and our own.

Much of life becomes background but it is the province of art to throw buckets of light into the shadows and make life a new again.

Were losing biodiversity globally at an alarming rate and we need a cornucopia of different plants and animals for the planets health and our own.

After all coffee is bitter a flavor from the forbidden and dangerous realm.

Complexity excites the mind and order rewards it. In the garden one finds both including vanishingly small orders too complex to spot and orders so vast the mind struggles to embrace them.

What would dawn have been like had you awakened It would have sung through your bones. All I can do this morning is let it sing through mine.

I dont want to get to the end of my life and find that I lived just the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.

Symbolic of life hair bolts from our heads. Like the earth it can be harvested but it will rise again. We can change its color and texture when the mood strikes us but in time it will return to its original form just as Nature will in time turn our precisely laid out cities into a weed way.

Hurricane season brings a humbling reminder that despite our technologies most of nature remains unpredictable.

Play is our brain's favourite way of learning.

Play is our brain's favorite way of learning.

Smell is the mute sense, the one without words.

Violets smell like burnt sugar cubes that have been dipped in lemon and velvet.

Wonder is the heaviest element on the periodic table. Even a tiny fleck of it stops time.

And rather than hide that, I would rather put that out on the radio and let someone see the full range of emotions. If you're going to be strong on the radio, you got to let it all out, even the ugly stuff. And you can't apologize for it.

Obviously, in dealing with a relationship, sexuality has to be involved, and jealousy and emotions like that. And I don't know, I've always been intrigued by those emotions.

Maybe I spent more time dwelling on emotions than some people, and maybe that's why I ended up writing.

In the First World War, there was the sudden passion of nationalism, and the killing took place because of these emotions. But the Soviet case is different, because you had systematic murder, like the Holocaust.

So while it is true that I find really dark stuff funny sometimes, it's also true that as a writer of books I want to have the whole range of human emotions.

When on the set of a film, you have to play natural for entire scenes in a very unnatural environment. You have to express emotions and interact with other actors and also use your voice.

Emotions are the fuel to really move you along - that's the only way you can create music. If you don't feel any emotions, it's not going to happen.