"Work becomes at once a delight and a tyrant. For even when the time comes and you can relax, you hardly know how."

“The pleasure of those who injure you lies in your pain. Therefore they will suffer if you take away their pleasure by not feeling pain”

“If you confine yourself to this Skinnerian technique, you study nothing but the learning apparatus and you leave out everything that is different in octopi, crustaceans, insects and vertebrates. In other words, you leave out everything that makes a pigeon a pigeon, a rat a rat, a man a man, and, above all, a healthy man healthy and a sick man sick.”

Source : Richard Isadore Evans, Konrad Lorenz (1975). “Konrad Lorenz: The Man and His Ideas”, Harcourt

“I once asked him what came at the end of the sentence... and he said "parole".”

“I think plays, like books, are endemic. They grow out of the soil of the writer and the place he's writing about. I think, you just can't move them about, you know.”

“I must have done everything I had. You go through years where you go through everything you've ever written”

“The monad, of which we shall speak here, is nothing but a simple substance which enters into compounds; simple, that is to say, without parts.”

“Rap is poetry set to music. But to me it's like a jackhammer.”

“The easier an experience, or the more entrenched, or the more familiar, the fainter our sensation of it becomes. This is true of chocolate and marriages and hometowns and narrative structures. Complexities wane, miracles become unremarkable, and if we're not careful, pretty soon we're gazing out at our lives as if through a burlap sack.”

Source : Anthony Doerr (2008). “Four Seasons in Rome: On Twins, Insomnia, and the Biggest Funeral in the History of the World”, p.54, Simon and Schuster