A kiss is like singing into someone's mouth.

As a species, we've somehow survived large and small ice ages, genetic bottlenecks, plagues, world wars and all manner of natural disasters, but I sometimes wonder if we'll survive our own ingenuity.

Above all, we ask the poet to teach us a way of seeing.

Variety is the pledge that matter makes to living things.

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.

Wonder is the heaviest element on the periodic table. Even a tiny fleck of it stops time.

Shaped a little like a loaf of French country bread, our brain is a crowded chemistry lab, bustling with nonstop neural conversations.Imagine the brain, that shiny mound of being, that mouse-gray parliament of cells, that dream factory, that petit tyrant inside a ball of bone, that huddle of neurons calling all the plays, that little everywhere, that fickle pleasuredome, that wrinkled wardrobe of selves stuffed into the skull like too many clothes into a gym bag.