"I disagree with the advice of 'write about what you know.' Write about what you need to know, in an effort to understand."

“Case studies of failure should be made a part of the vocabulary of every engineer so that he or she can recall or recite them when something in a new design or design process is suggestive of what went wrong in the case study.”

Source : "ASK OCE Interview: Five Questions for Dr. Henry Petroski". Interview with Henry Petroski, appel.nasa.gov. July 20, 2006.

“It was going to be a long, dark night but not quite as dark as it was in the abyss of his heart where there was nothing but hollowness, yet it felt heavy, almost as if someone still resided there.”

“So, open your mouth, lad! For every voice counts!”

“I walked to the lake and sat on the shore for a few minutes, just staring at the moonlight on the water. Moonlight never gets old.”

Source : Bill Barich (2015). “Traveling Light: A Year of Wandering, from California to England and Tuscany and Back Again”, p.188, Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.

“When I was doing 'Generation Kill' in Africa I worked with five really super-trained Navy SEALs who taught us all these moves like how to disarm people: if there's a bar fight and someone's got a chair or there's someone with a gun behind our head, how to disable them and take them down in a swift move.”

“Despite all that good news, there's plenty of horror stories being told. All of them are untrue, but they're being told all over America,”

“There needs to be a lot more emphasis on what a child CAN do, instead of what he cannot do.”

“I had been dreaming a complicated dream about helping poets revise their poems, so that each ending would open like a flower. I was not arguing, but engaged in a rousing discussion.”