Some bioengineering is good, especially if it results in plants that are more drought-resistant or perennial food crops.

Was this a betrayal, or was it an act of courage? Perhaps both. Neither one involves forethought: such things take place in an instant, in an eyeblink. This can only be because they have been rehearsed by us already, over and over, in silence and darkness; in such silence, such darkness, that we are ignorant of them ourselves. Blind but sure-footed, we step forward as if into a remembered dance.

I tried to visualize my jealousy as a yellowy-brown cloud boiling around inside me, then going out through my nose like smoke and turning into a stone and falling down into the ground. That did work a little. But in my visualization a plant covered with poison berries would grow out of the stone, whether I wanted it to or not.

Messy love is better than none, I guess. I am no authority on sane living.

Once upon a time, novelists of the 19th century, such as Charles Dickens, published in serial form.

Every budding dictatorship begins by muzzling the artists, because they're a mouthy lot and they don't line up and salute very easily.

friendship was always contingent.