“Disassemble the cells of a sponge (by passing them through a sieve, for instance), then dump them into a solution, and they will find their way back together and build themselves into a sponge agai...”

“Hunters will tell you that a moose is a wily and ferocious forest creature. Nonsense. A moose is a cow drawn by a three-year-old.”

“Three hundred types of mussel, a third of the worlds total, live in the Smokies. Smokies mussels have terrific names, like purple wartyback, shiny pigtoe, and monkeyface pearlymussel. Unfortunately...”

“I know a man who drives 600 yards to work. I know a woman who gets in her car to go a quarter of a mile to a college gymnasium to walk on a treadmill, then complains passionately about the difficul...”

“Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of gen...”

“If this book has a lesson, it is that we are awfully lucky to be here-and by 'we' I mean every living thing. To attain any kind of life in this universe of ours appears to be quite an achievement. ...”

“My heart is small, like a love of buttons or black pepper.”

“Feeling the inevitable claim of the this desert, he experienced a desire to throw off his civilized costume, hurl himself upon Josephina, either succumb, or return to Guadalajara, where men could o...”

“Never allow anyone to take you out of character, some people know which buttons to press. (Zip it instead)”

“I cleaned the shit off my pink high-tops and drove home, stopping for an espresso at the coffeehouse across from the college. Men and women were hunched over copies of Jean Paul Sartre and writing ...”

“Best of all, she waits outside the dressing room while I'm changing. Girlfriends don't do this but wives do, and if there is any better reason to get married than to have someone to hold your hand ...”

“[T]he dozen or so items I wished to return to XXI Forever could only be traded in, and the store had a strict BOGO policy: Buy One, Get One (Free). This means that the 12 items I had but did not ne...”

“If I had a dime for every time I heard someone say that they're tired of a genre (zombies) because it's only a fad, I'd be rich. #DeadRising”