My siblings and I grew up on Indian food. My mother, though of Slovenian descent, learned to cook Indian delicacies for my father after their wedding.

No bubble is so iridescent or floats longer than that blown by the successful teacher.

The history of American democracy, to say the least, has been checkered. Our nation was founded at a time when people of African descent were held in bondage. After slavery was abolished, they were forced to endure legal discrimination for another 100 years.

Modern science says: 'The sun is the past, the earth is the present, the moon is the future.' From an incandescent mass we have originated, and into a frozen mass we shall turn. Merciless is the law of nature, and rapidly and irresistibly we are drawn to our doom.

From my experience, I would say no: actors of East Asian descent don't get the opportunities white actors do. I know that's inherently a problem in a country that produces a lot of period drama, but I have to fight so hard to get parts that don't have something to do with China.

After 1980, you never heard reference to space again. Surface, the most convincing evidence of the descent into materialism, became the focus of design. Space disappeared.

When I began work on my first book, 'The River of Doubt,' which tells the story of Theodore Roosevelt's 1914 descent of an unmapped river in the Amazon rainforest, I thought of it as a tale of adventure, exploration and extraordinary courage.

Whether we're conscious of it or not, our work and personal lives are made up of daily rituals, including when we eat our meals, how we shower or groom, or how we approach our daily descent into the digital world of email communication.

Colorful garments - ball gowns, kimonos, evening pajamas - made from yards upon yards of iridescent silk or velvet. I own an unjustifiable number of such outfits and jump at the chance to wear them. Against the etiquette about which I am otherwise all too conscious, I frequently, and unrepentantly, overdress for the occasion.

Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.

Sabotaging a person , so that you can say they have failed, but deep down you know the truth and what that person is capable of doing. Does not mean they have failed, but it means you failed them and you failed at being a descent human being.

Do you see my diamond-studded smile and passion-filled eyes? It's because I'm in that stage of my life where I have nothing to prove to anyone. There is no elaborate pretence and no lavish ostentations. Genuineness smoulders in yellow gold, and I carry integrity on my eyelids. I stitch virtue, ornately and intricately, in every feather of my powder silver wings, which thrusts me past the iridescent rainbow where my ambitions soar high amid the dappled blanket of the sky. This is I; the stronger me, the happier me and the empowered me.

Gods should be iridescent, like the rainbow in the storm. Man creates a God in his own image, and the Gods grow old along with the men that made them... But the God-stuff roars eternally, like the sea, with too vast a sound to be heard.

But walking causes absorption. Walking interminably, taking in through your pores the height of the mountains when you are confronting them at length, breathing in the shape of the hills for hours at a time during a slow descent. The body becomes steeped in the earth it treads. And thus, gradually, it stops being in the landscape: it becomes the landscape. That doesn't have to mean dissolution, as if the walker were fading away to become a mere inflection, a footnote. It's more a flashing moment: sudden flame, time catching fire. And here, the feeling of eternity is all at once that vibration between presences. Eternity, here, in a spark.

Slice a pear and you will find that its flesh is incandescent white. It glows with inner light. Those who carry a knife and a pear are never afraid of the dark.

Only the descent into the hell of self-knowledge can pave the way to Godliness.

Some of us get dipped in flat, some in satin, some in gloss...." He turned to me. "But every once in a while, you find someone who's iridescent, and when you do, nothing will ever compare.

Falling into ruin was a bit like falling in love: Both descents stripped you bare and left you as you were at your core. And both endings are equally painful.

You may only call me "Mrs. Darcy"... when you are completely, and perfectly, and incandescently happy.

No bubble is so iridescent or floats longer than that blown by the successful teacher.

After 1980 you never heard reference to space again. Surface the most convincing evidence of the descent into materialism became the focus of design. Space disappeared.