Thinking clearly is a conscious act that writers must force on themselves, - William Zinsser

Vulnerability has a strength of its own.

I had been sitting in Joan Countryman’s living room for two hours talking about mathematics. My pulse was steady, the hand that held my note-taking pencil didn’t shake and wasn’t even clammy. Where was that old math anxiety? I hadn’t been at any loss for questions; they came to me naturally. Like the process of writing, the process of asking questions had been a form of learning, raising further questions and telling me what I wanted to know next. I was genuinely curious. It never occurred to me that this was a subject I wasn’t supposed to be any good at. What did occur to me was that mathematics was not some arcane system of numbers; it was a language, a way of putting thoughts together. I might never master the language — my checkbook might still go unbalanced — but at least I had begun to glimpse what the language was trying to say and how it could help people to understand the world around them.

But what if we fail' they ask, whispering the dreaded word across the Generation Gap to their parents. 'Don't' they whisper back. What they should say is 'Don't be afraid to fail. Failure isn't fatal