But you can't make people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up around them. It can't last.

This is the result of six billion years of evolution. Tonight, we have given the lie to gravity.We have reached for the stars.

Old men only lie in wait for people to ask them to talk. Then they rattle on like a rusty elevator wheezing up a shaft.

Action is hope. At the end of each day, when you've done your work, you lie there and think, Well, I'll be damned, I did this today. It doesn't matter how good it is, or how bad-you did it. At the end of the week you'll have a certain amount of accumulation. At the end of a year, you look back and say, I'll be damned, it's been a good year.

You take the books, you lie there in the pools of light and you drink life. That is how intensely I have loved libraries.