That's the trouble with losing your mind; by the time it's gone, it's too late to get it back.

I turned to my own bunk and examined it with a kind of appalled fascination. If the mattress stains were anything to go by, a previous user had not so much suffered from incontinence as rejoiced in it. He had evidently included the pillow in his celebrations.

I do find London exciting. Much as I hate to agree with that tedious old git Samuel Johnson, and despite the pompous imbecility of his famous remark about when a man is tired of London he is tired of life...I can't dispute it.

Out of the thirty thousand types of edible plants thought to exist on Earth, just eleven—corn, rice, wheat, potatoes, cassava, sorghum, millet, beans, barley, rye, and oats—account for 93 percent of all that humans eat, and every one of them was first cultivated by our Neolithic ancestors.

I was heading to Nebraska. Now there's a sentence you don't want to say too often if you can possibly help it.

18th century scientists, the French in particular, seldom did things simply if an absurdly demanding alternative was available.

99.99 percent of all species that have ever lived are no longer with us.