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.

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.

A sister is a little bit of childhood that can never be lost.

A lot of people have gotten into comedy because of certain influences in their lives or events that were painful, and I really have wracked my brain to figure it out. I pretty much have had a normal childhood. Maybe it was too normal.

It sounds ideal, a sort of beach childhood. But it wasn't really. I didn't use the beach very much at all.

All our pursuits, from childhood to manhood, are only trifles of different sorts and sizes, proportioned to our years and views.

The secret of the truly successful, I believe, is that they learned very early in life how not to be busy. They saw through that adage, repeated to me so often in childhood, that anything worth doing is worth doing well.

I don't carry any early childhood trauma around with me, if that's what you're hinting at. The story of the bicycles - and there were three of them which were stolen from me - I've dealt with it well.

Remember Graham Green's dictum that childhood is the bank balance of the writer? I think that all writers feel alienated. Most of us go back to an alienated childhood in some way or another. I know that I do.