As my father always used to tell me, 'You see, son, there's always someone in the world worse off than you.' And I always used to think, 'So?

In terms of adaptability, humans are pretty amazingly useless.

A significant fraction of thru-hikers reach Katahdin, then turn around and start back to Georgia. They just can't stop walking, which kind of makes you wonder.

Physics is really nothing more than a search for ultimate simplicity, but so far all we have is a kind of elegant messiness.

You may find that your parents are the most delightful people, but you don't want to live with them.

Maine is wonderful. It can be very hard. I mean, if you look at the profile maps it doesn't look it, but somehow when you get out there it's really steep and hard.

No one knows, incidentally, why Australia's spiders are so extravagantly toxic; capturing small insects and injecting them with enough poison to drop a horse would appear to be the most literal case of overkill. Still, it does mean that everyone gives them lots of space.