By the mid-17th century, telescopes had improved enough to make visible the seasonally growing and shrinking polar ice caps on Mars, and features such as Syrtis Major, a dark patch thought to be a shallow sea.

Professionalism in art has this difficulty: To be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable is to be predictable, and predictability is esthetically boring - an anti-virtue in a field where we hope to be astonished and startled and at some deep level refreshed.

I don't write about too many male businessmen, and I'm not apt to write about too many female businessmen.

For male and female alike, the bodies of the other sex are messages signaling what we must do, they are glowing signifiers of our own necessities.

It is good to have an intellectual awareness of our dependence upon God - to understand how great He is and how very small we are in His sight.

Faith is a passionate intuition.

I think people who don't go away to university are missing out on one of the great life experiences. You meet people from so many different places and it's the shared life experience that helps you grow.

I have been in an experience where I thought everything that I had hoped for in my life was taken away from me, and I had to redefine what mattered.