"However brilliant the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results."
                                                           -Sir Winston Churchill

"We are made to persist. That's how we find out who we are."
                                                                     – Tobias Wolff

About Tobias Wolff

American author Tobias Wolff is best known for the memoir A Boy's Life, about Wolff's childhood with an itinerant mother and abusive stepfather. He was born in 1945 in Alabama and spent most of his childhood in the Pacific Northwest. His book In Pharaoh's Army: Memories of the Lost War recounts his experiences as a young soldier in Vietnam. He is an acclaimed writing professor at Stanford University. He has three children.

"I don't want to get to the end of my life and find that I have just lived the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well."
                                                                              – Diane Ackerman

About Diane Ackerman

American poet and nonfiction author Diane Ackerman has written more than 20 books and is best known for the eloquently written best seller The Natural History of the Senses. She was born in Illinois in 1948. While working toward her Ph.D. at Cornell, she studied both arts and sciences, feeling "the universe wasn't knowable from only one perspective." She has a molecule named after her: the dianeacerkone. She lives in upstate New York with her novelist husband.