Research, in nature’s laboratory, never stops. It explores every possibility. It never lacks funding. It is never demoralized by failed experiments. It cannot be lobbied.

Other seasons come abruptly but ask so little when they do. Winter is the only one that has to be relearned.

The Unexpected stalks a farm in big boots like a vagrant bent on havoc. Not every farmer is an inventor, but the good ones have the seeds of invention within them. Economy and efficiency move their relentless tinkering and yet the real motive often seems to be aesthetic. The mind that first designed a cutter bar is not far different from a mind that can take the intractable steel of an outsized sickle blade and make it hum in the end. The question is how to reduce the simplicity that constitutes a problem ("It's simple; it's broke.") to the greater simplicity that constitutes a solution.

The words are not mere words. They are the breath and mind, perhaps even the soul, of the person who is reading.

Solve global warming, eliminate the nuclear threat, and we will still have to confront the vastness of our species and the way it diminishes, without thinking, all the other species around it.

A reasonable agriculture would do its best to emulate nature. Rather than change the earth to suit a crop... it would diversify its crops to suit the earth

I look at the books on my library shelves. They certainly seem dormant. But what if the characters are quietly rearranging themselves? What if Emma Woodhouse doesn't learn from her mistakes? What if Tom Jones descends into a sodden life of poaching and outlawry? What if Eve resists Satan, remembering God's injunction and Adam's loving advice? I imagine all the characters bustling to get back into their places as they feel me taking the book down from the shelf. Hurry, they say, he'll expect to find us exactly where he left us, never mind how much his life has changed in the meantime.