"What should you, O man, do, you who seek your own glory whenever you do anything good, while when you do something bad, you figure out ways to blame God."

"No zek had the right to stay one second in his workroom without the supervision of a free employee because prudence dictated that the prisoner would be bound to use that unsupervised second to break into the steel safe with a lead pencil, photograph its secret documents with a trouser button, explode an atom bomb, and fly to the moon."

"A little girl and her father were walking along in the evening. She was fascinated by the stars, and kept looking up at them, but made no comment until her father asked what she was thinking. She replied, 'If the bottom side of heaven is so beautiful, how wonderful the other side must be."

"We need somebody who's got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it's like to be a young teenage mom, the empathy to understand what it's like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old - and that's the criterion by which I'll be selecting my judges."

"A book unwritten is a delightful universe of infinite possibilities. Set down one word, however, and it immediately becomes earthbound. Set down one sentence and it’s halfway to being just like every other bloody book that’s ever been written."

"Though denigrated by some outside academia and research, she embraced knowledge for its own sake and what better way to honor that than reveling in the intricacies of the brain? If there were any answers to the human condition, if an immortal soul made its home anywhere, it was in its spongy gray folds."

"Now it’s clear to me, I haven’t understood as well as I should, the cracks on the ground we stood. A blast ignited through ballot boxes by the choices of unsuspecting and innocent Nigerians has rippled across the country and has torn the curtain open to set the stage for these cracks to grow into magnified quakes now swallowing us up.” - Dami K."