Canadians and Americans may look alike, but the contents of their heads are quite different. Americans experience themselves, individually, as small toads in the biggest and most powerful puddle in the world. Their sense of power comes from identifying with the puddle. Canadians as individuals may have more power within the puddle, since there are fewer toads in it; it's the puddle that's seen as powerless.

Science is a tool, and we invent tools to do things we want. It's a question of how those tools are used by people.

Some people mistakenly think nature is very nice and benevolent and never betrays.

I've learned quite a lot, over the years, by avoiding what I was supposed to be learning.

A man is just a woman's strategy for making other women.

A divorce is like an amputation: you survive it, but there's less of you.

Every ending is arbitrary, because the end is where you write The end. A period, a dot of punctuation, a point of stasis. A pinprick in the paper: you could put your eye to it and see through, to the other side, to the beginning of something else. Or, as Tony says to her students, Time is not a solid, like wood, but a fluid, like water or the wind. It doesn't come neatly cut into even-sized length, into decades and centuries. Nevertheless, for our purposes we have to pretend it does. The end of any history is a lie in which we all agree to conspire.