It is easy to live multiple lives! What is hard is to be a whole person

Childhood isn't just those years. It's also the opinions you form about them afterward. That's why our childhoods are so long.

A sudden gust: How big the world seems in a wind.

There was nothing for it but to pace through just behind or ahead of the spooling present that was never there, caught in the nonexistent interval between the nonexistent past and the nonexistent future.

Look at the pattern this seashell makes. The dappled whorl, curving inward to infinity. That's the shape of the universe itself. There's constant pressure, pushing towards pattern. A tendency in matter to evolve into ever more complex forms. It's a kind of pattern gravity, a holy greening power we call 'Viriditas' and it is the driving force in the cosmos. Life, you see.

Atoms have a nucleus, made of protons and neutrons bound together. Around this nucleus shells of electrons spin, and each shell is either full or trying to get full, to balance with the number of protons-to balance the number of positive and negative charges. An atom is like a human heart, you see.

In an expanding universe, order is not really order, but merely the difference between the actual entropy exhibited and the maximum entropy possible.