Life is often compared to a marathon, but I think it is more like being a sprinter; long stretches of hard work punctuated by brief moments in which we are given the opportunity to perform at our best.

With each new day in Africa, a gazelle wakes up knowing he must outrun the fastest lion or perish. At the same time, a lion stirs and stretches, knowing he must outrun the fastest gazelle or starve. It's no different for the human race. Whether you consider yourself a gazelle or a lion, you have to run faster than others to survive.

Those fields of daisies we landed on, and dusty fields and desert stretches. Memories of many skies and earths beneath us - many days, many nights of stars.

The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary.

Through art, we learn to understand ourselves and light up the veiled angles in our minds. It teaches us how to get hold of life and get a sense of the shades in the wild richness of the abundant diversity that stretches through our daily experience. It gives us a foothold in the estranging landscapes we cross during our life journey and helps us figure out the wisdom behind the countless signs and tokens. (Stilling our mind)

Miles of now, right before our eyes. The present is an ocean: deep and wide. So unlimited in its extent that you can hardly understand it. Without a goal, you drift upon it and desperately wonder how far it stretches, the present, before it will be past. How far away from it does the future start and how much of it can we ever grasp?

Time bows to authentic commitment, and it stretches to accommodate it.

Losing a belief in free will has not made me fatalistic-in fact, it has increased my feelings of freedom. My hopes, fears, and neuroses seem less personal and indelible. There is no telling how much I might change in the future. Just as one wouldn't draw a lasting conclusion about oneself on the basis of a brief experience of indigestion, one needn't do so on the basis of how one has thought or behaved for vast stretches of time in the past. A creative change of inputs to the system-learning new skills, forming new relationships, adopting new habits of attention-may radically transform one's life.

Culture had worked in her own case, but during the last few weeks she had doubted whether it humanized the majority, so wide and so widening is the gulf that stretches between the natural and the philosophic man, so many the good chaps who are wrecked in trying to cross it.

"A bridge of silver wings stretches from the dead ashes of an unforgiving nightmare

Technology has a shadow side. It accounts for real progress in medicine but has also hurt it in many ways making it more impersonal expensive and dangerous. The false belief that a safety net of sophisticated drugs and machines stretches below us permitting risky or lazy lifestyle choices has undermined our spirit of self-reliance.

At the very end of a book I can manage to work for longer stretches but mostly making stuff up for three hours that's enough. I can't do any more. At the end of the day I might tinker with my morning's work and maybe write some again. But I think three hours is fine.

Every summer my husband and I pack our suitcases load our kids into the car and drive from tense crowded New York City to my family's cottage in Maine. It's on an island with stretches of sea and sandy beaches rocky coasts and pine trees. We barbecue swim lie around and try to do nothing.