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.

Des Moines is like your typical American city; it's just these concentric circles of malls, built outward from the city.

Every dog on the face of the earth wants me dead.

When you tell an Iowan a joke, you can see a kind of race going on between his brain and his expression.

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

The upshot of all this is that we live in a universe whose age we can't quite compute, surrounded by stars whose distances we don't altogether know, filled with matter we can't identify, operating in conformance with physical laws whose properties we don’t truly understand.

In my day, the principal concerns of university students were sex, smoking dope, rioting and learning. Learning was something you did only when the first three weren't available.