Lauren

“Rereading old books is the highest form of literary pleasure and instructs you in what is deepest in your own yearnings.

Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you, because it is, at least in my experience, the most healing of pleasures. It returns you to otherness, whether in yourself or in friends. Imaginative literature is otherness and as such, alleviates loneliness.”
― Harold Bloom

“It's the fine balance of caffeine and alcohol that bookends my days”
― Tim Minchin

“Please don’t make the mistake of thinking the arts and sciences are at odds with one another. That is a recent, stupid, and damaging idea. You don’t have to be unscientific to make beautiful art, to write beautiful things.

If you need proof: Twain, Adams, Vonnegut, McEwen, Sagan, Shakespeare, Dickens. For a start.

You don’t need to be superstitious to be a poet. You don’t need to hate GM technology to care about the beauty of the planet. You don’t have to claim a soul to promote compassion.

Science is not a body of knowledge nor a system of belief; it is just a term which describes humankind’s incremental acquisition of understanding through observation. Science is awesome.”
― Tim Minchin

“Many people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book.”
― Jane Smiley Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel