I knew that alpaca wool, with its cashmere-soft weave, had been transformed into cuddly knick-knacks ranging from pillows to teddy bears. But through selective breeding over the past 6,000 years, alpacas have so diverged from their llama cousins as to become quite different animals.
Life is a culmination of the past, an awareness of the present, an indication of a future beyond knowledge, the quality that gives a touch of divinity to matter.
My life is every moment of my life. It is not a culmination of the past.
'The Outsider' is a culmination of a lot of things I've been working diligently toward as a recording artist. Hopefully it will render my past pigeonholing obsolete while positioning me more solidly as a socially conscious American singer/songwriter. Wouldn't that be entertaining?
Fear is the culprit that robs us of our greatest lives. And although it's mostly made up or a learned behavior from our past, almost everybody I've ever met in my life struggles with fear.
We're the curator for the African-American experience for the past, present and future. That's my job.
The past cannot be cured.
If you don't have your experiences in the moment, if you gloss them over with jokes or zoom past them, you end up with curiously dispassionate memories.
I like fiction and the kind of history that gives the grace and flavor of fiction to the past. No bloviation on current events, please. I can write that junk myself.
The current state of knowledge is a moment in history, changing just as rapidly as the state of knowledge in the past has ever changed and, in many instances, more rapidly.
There's power in turning to the past to illuminate the current state of things.
In the past few years, we've been doing amazing stuff with desserts. Pastry chefs have been using herbs and spices in their desserts. So vanilla cake doesn't have to be just vanilla, it can have a little thyme. Or you could have a custard with a little lavender in it, which is just amazing.
In Czechoslovakia in 1968, communist reformers appealed to democratic ideals that were deeply rooted in the country's pre-second world war past.
In 2010, I ran for Congress in a Democratic primary against someone who had been there for 18 years. 'The Daily News' endorsed me. I was in 'The New York Times' above the fold. CNBC called this one of the hottest races in the country. On election day, votes for me never went past 19%. I lost.
I have done so many love scenes in the past that I have learned how to pull off a sexy smoulder on the dance floor.
They did ask me to do 'Dancing With The Stars;' I said I can do one show, but on that show you have to come up with a new number every week, and I told them that I think I'm a little past that stage.
He was what I often think is a dangerous thing for a statesman to be - a student of history; and like most of those who study history, he learned from the mistakes of the past how to make new ones.
Despite the increase in world attention toward Sudan in the past months, the genocide in Darfur has continued without any serious attempt by the Sudanese government to do what governments primarily exist to do, protect their citizens.
It's been dawning on me slowly that for the past 35 years I have been cast against type, and I'm finally getting to do what I really wanted to do.
You have moments of grief in life, and if you can put pen to paper and capture that, that's something wonderful. I can revisit actual songs about past deaths, and I know that emotion is as true now as it was then.
