Our relationship with nature has changed radically, irreversibly, but by no means all for the bad. Our new epoch is laced with invention. Our mistakes are legion, but our talent is immeasurable.

On some summer days in New York City, the air hangs thickly visible, like the combined exhalations of eight million souls. Steam rising from vents underground makes you wonder if there isn't one giant sweat gland lodged beneath the city.

I hate the fearful trimming of possibilities that age brings.

The knowing, I told myself, is only a vapor of the mind, and yet it can wreck havok with one's sanity.

Though most of us don't hunt, our eyes are still the great monopolists of our senses. To taste or touch your enemy or your food, you have to be unnervingly close to it. To smell or hear it, you can risk being further off. But vision can rush through the fields and up the mountains, travel across time, country, and parsecs of outer space, and collect bushel baskets of information as it goes. Animals that hear high frequencies better than we do

Home is where the heart is, we say, rubbing the flint of one abstraction against another.

I am a great fan of the universe, which I take literally: as one. All of it interests me, and it interests me in detail.