Out of the nursery into the college and back into the nursery; there’s your intellectual pattern for the past five centuries or more.

That's life for you," said MacDunn. "Someone always waiting for someone who never comes home. Always someone loving some thing more than that thing loves them. And after a while you want to destroy whatever that thing is, so it can't hurt you no more.

This is the emotional thing, you see - you must galvanize people, so they want to be completely alive and live forever, or the next thing to it. And out of that comes art, then, and survival through emotion.

This is the result of six billion years of evolution. Tonight, we have given the lie to gravity.We have reached for the stars.

Treasure this day and Treasure yourself, truly, neither will ever happen again.

What church could compete with the fireworks of the pure soul?

Gardening is the handiest excuse for being a philosopher. Nobody guesses, nobody accuses, nobody knows, but there you are, Plato in the peonies, Socrates force-growing his own hemlock. A man toting a sack of blood manure across his lawn is kin to Atlas letting the world spin easy on his shoulder.