To romp along the connected rooftops and fire escapes of Chicagos second city of garages was my young lifes passion.

We are all of us walking communities of bacteria. The world shimmers, a pointillist landscape made of tiny living beings.

Life on earth is more like a verb. It repairs, maintains, re-creates, and outdoes itself.

All I ask is that we compare human consciousness with spirochete ecology.

All living beings, not just animals, but plants and microorganisms, perceive. To survive, an organic being must perceive - it must seek, or at least recognize, food and avoid environmental danger.

Natural selection eliminates and maybe maintains, but it doesn't create.

Everybody knows what a caterpillar is, and it doesn't look anything like a butterfly.

Life learned early on to recognize itself.

Evolution is no linear family tree, but change in the single multidimensional being that has grown to cover the entire surface of Earth.

I was taught over and over again that the accumulation of random mutations led to evolutionary change - led to new species. I believed it until I looked for evidence.

The fewer species there are and the fewer species we know about, the fewer questions we even know to ask.

A life based on [religious] faith is a life based on pure speculation, and speculation is, by its very definition, unsound.

Sometimes it's good just to be seduced by the particular cheeses spread out in front of you on a cheese counter.

Everything that gets born dies.

Thought that is silenced is always rebellious.

As we grow older, the memories of early life brighten, those of maturity and senescence grow dim and confused.

Women are well on the road to equality but we haven't arrived yet.

I didn't want to fall into the trap of competing with all these other great guitar players. I just want to sidestep the whole thing and get out of the race.

In the Universe the difficult things are done as if they were easy.

I grew up being fascinated by accents and dialects. One of the things that interested me were actors that were doing different characters, or sort of more caricatures.

I feel very vulnerable at Halloween. I feel that people who might come to the door might not have candy intentions. I'm a little lady and I can be overcome.