I watched the gorilla's eyes again, wise and knowing eyes, and wondered about this business of trying to teach apes language. Our language. Why? There are many members of our own species who live in and with the forest and know it and understand it. We don't listen to them. What is there to suggest we would listen to anything an ape could tell us? Or that it would be able to tell us of its life in a language that hasn't been born of that life? I thought, maybe it is not that they have yet to gain a language, it is that we have lost one.

Deep in the fundamental heart of mind and Universe there is a reason.

A beach house isn't just real estate. It's a state of mind.

If life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.

I always thought something was fundamentally wrong with the universe

Fifteen years was a long time to be stranded anywhere, particularly somewhere as mind-boggingly dull as Earth.

When the girl sitting at the next table looked away from a moment, Dirk leaned over and took her coffee. He knew that he was perfectly safe doing this because she would simply not be able to believe that this had happened.