I'd always be loaning my sister money, knowing full well I wasn't going to get it back. But she had the kids, and that paid me back.

Some children challenge themselves to maybe run a marathon or something. I challenged myself to stay up for two days and make cinnamon toast and watch the Jerry Lewis Telethon and laugh and cry.

My sister was three years older than me, and she was like the stone-cold '70s fox. I looked like a short Polish farm woman, and so our journals were wildly different.

My sister's journal was the romantic one with boys, and mine was talking about my rock tumbler. We were so different and so similar.

I am deeply spiritual; I revel in those things that make for good - the things that we can do to shed a little light, to help place an oft-dissonant universe back in tune with itself... Long live art, long live friendship, long live the joy of life!

Might we... be doing something with our brains that cannot be described in computational terms at all? How do our feelings of conscious awareness - of happiness, pain, love, aesthetic sensibility, will, understanding, etc. - fit into such a computational picture?

Fearlessness is not only possible, it is the ultimate joy. When you touch nonfear, you are free.

I believe that all is illusion and vanity outside the treasure of truths slowly accumulated, and which will never again be lost. I believe that the sum of these truths, always increasing, will at last confer on man incalculable power and peace, if not happiness. Yes, I believe in the final triumph of life.