“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...”

“It pains me even now, even a million years later, to write about such human misbehaviour.A million years later, I feel like apologizing for the human race. Thats all I can say.”

“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.”

“After that hard winter, one could not get enough of the nimble air. Every morning I wakened with a fresh consciousness that winter was over. There were none of the signs of spring for which I used ...”

“He realized that when he had been afraid to change he had been holding on to the illusion of Old Cheese that was no longer there”

“Where to start?Everything cracks and shakes,The air trembles with similes,No one world's better than another;the earth moans with metaphors.”