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

“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.”

“Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of wi...”

“My dear,Find what you love and let it kill you.Let it drain you of your all. Let it cling onto your back and weigh you down into eventual nothingness.Let it kill you and let it devour your remains....”

“If you gave someone your heart and they died, did they take it with them? Did you spend the rest of forever with a hole inside you that couldn't be filled?”

“A lady's imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment.”

“I've always said that idleness dulls the spirit. We have to keep the brain busy, or at least the hands if we don't have a brain.”

“If your workplace was somehow transplanted into the jungle and everyone was forced to survive at a very primitive level, it's safe to say that eventually your boss would rape you.”