Nor are we the culmination of evolution, except in the sense that there has never been another species so bizarrely ingenious that it could create both iambic pentameter and plutonium.

The swallow that hibernates underwater is a creature called yearning.

The elk are the most abundant large herbivores in the Yellowstone ecosystem. There are thousands and thousands of them. They migrate in and out. And those migration routes need to stay open.

Identity is such a crucial affair that one shouldn't rush into it.

By the cold Darwinian logic of natural selection, evolution codifies happenstance into strategy.

Islands are havens and breeding grounds for the unique and anomalous. They are natural laboratories of extravagant evolutionary experimentation.

Among the earliest forms of human self-awareness was the awareness of being meat.

I wrote four novels, but then I realized that the world didn't need me to be a novelist, but the world could use me as a nonfiction writer.

If you are lying in a tent in the Congo jungle, you don't want to be reading about rainforest biology. You want to be in a distant world.

Mathematics to me is like a language I don’t speak though I admire its literature in translation.

I used to read only fiction. Now I don't read much, only occasionally, such as a Cormac McCarthy or a Jim Harrison novel.

Its strangeness is, we might say, due to its very reality, to the very fact that there is existence. The questioning of Being is an experience of Being in its strangeness

The stars could fall - the moon could crash from the heavens - and Mariko could not care.

Many times people will ask themselves, "where do I fit in?" This is my answer: You have the ability to fit where ever you are meant to be.

America is much better than the leadership we have in Washington.

There are many people of color who are very talented.

A watchful eye must be kept on ourselves lest while we are building ideal monuments of Renown and Bliss here we neglect to have our names enrolled in the Annals of Heaven.

You can't control the perception of others no matter how hard you try. Do things that promote personal growth and health.

Your eyes show the strength of your soul.

One of the biggest advantages that start ups have is execution speed and you have to have this relentless operating rhythm.

To judge a man means nothing more than to ask: What content does he give to the form of humanity? What concept should we have of humanity if he were its only representative?