Quotes from Harry N. MacLean

Predicting correctly is the definition of wisdom.

Q didn't believe, as some people did, that the squirrels would remember where they buried each walnut. He

He would talk in a hoarse whisper for months, and his left shoulder would develop a permanent droop.

but he would bet his life that it had a white CB antenna on the roof and that the driver was listening to police bands.

In the beginning, the lovemaking was frequent and wild, but with little genuine feeling, like good pornography. Our true intimacy was the unspoken belief that we were living honest lives without the artifice and deceit so necessary in most relationships.

The joy of expiration is as natural as the joy of loving, the joy of killing, the joy of being.

If you wipe the screen clean, you must accept the truth of what then appears.

How many scenes in your life like this have you missed? I think. The unseen beauty of nature. Like today.

The ecstasy of the moment will, I believe, lead the way to the terribly elusive clarity I seek.

We're all animals, you know? We do what we think is right.

You experience every moment as equal to the other, for the pure joy of it, like drinking a good wine or, as in the case of the Professor taking a good life. You treasure it the way the tree treasures Buddha, the way a cat prizes the mouse, the rose the sun. You perceive it and let it go, to be what it will.

There is no self that exists independent of the forces that created it, and thus you cannot be held personally, or perhaps I should say morally, accountable for what you did or didn't do.

What sticks with her students long after they're gone and grown up is the feeling that, as children, this adult treated them as human beings.