“What made marriage so difficult back then was yet again that instigator of so many other sorts of heartbreak: the oversize brain.”

“I say the same thing about the death of James Wait. "Oh, well -- he wasn't going to write the Beethoven's Ninth Symphony anyway.”

“As Mary delivered what was to be her last lecture about the Galapagos Islands, she would be stopped mid-sentence for five seconds by a doubt which, if expressed in words, might have come out someth...”

“Mary Hepburn was meanwhile murdering herself up in her room, lying on her bed with the polyethylene sheath of her "Jackie dress" swapped around her head. The sheath was now all steamed up inside, a...”

“That, in my opinion, was the most diabolical aspect of those old-time big brains: They would tell their owners, in effect, 'Here is a crazy thing we could actually do, probably, but we would never ...”

“As the new Adam, it might be said, his final act was to cast the Apple of Knowledge into the deep blue sea.”

“Sometimes resilience arrives in the moment you discover your own unshakeable goodness.”

“When you plant a seed of love, it is you that blossoms.”

“All I ever wanted was to reach out and touch another human being not just with my hands but with my heart.”