Quotations

E.O. Wilson has written: ’... the next century will see the closing of the Cenozoic Era (the Age of Mammals) and a new one characterized not by new life forms but by biological impoverishment.

The Buddha sought salvation in the extinction of the self; but if there is no self, what is there to be saved?

People believe in God because the world is very complicated and they think it is very unlikely that anything as complicated as a flying squirrel or the human eye or a brain could happen by chance.

What actually happens when you die is that your brain stops working and your body rots, like Rabbit did when he died and we buried him in the earth at the bottom of the garden.

And then there is me, sad little me, living in a dream, staring out the window, never again to find love.

I am not a stupid woman. I am aware that there is a world out there that functions without regard to me. There are wars and budgets and bombings and vast dimensions of wealth and greed and ambition and corruption.

I’m looking out the pickup truck’s window at Ambleside Beach and the ocean and the freighters – at the mothers tending to their children covered in sand and sugar and spit, at the blue sky and the mallard ducks and the Canada geese.

Streams evolve through a balance of forces. The bed shifts as it erodes one bank and dumps its remains on the other. It returns when its loops are cut off as the water finds a more direct route downhill.

Cities … do not last. The first was founded but ten thousand years ago, and many have come and gone since then. Sometimes, the sole evidence of their passing lies in evolution.