"At bottom every man knows well enough that he is a unique being, only once on this earth; and by no extraordinary chance will such a marvelously picturesque piece of diversity in unity as he is, ever be put together a second time."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"Longevity-and sanity. Eccentric old ladies on Harleys I can deal with."
— Alison Larkin (The English American: A Novel)

"A four-letter alphabet called DNA."
— Matt Ridley (The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature)

"I placed some of the DNA on the ends of my fingers and rubbed them together. The stuff was sticky. It began to dissolve on my skin. 'It's melting -- like cotton candy.'
'Sure. That's the sugar in the DNA,' Smith said.
'Would it taste sweet?'
'No. DNA is an acid, and it's got salts in it. Actually, I've never tasted it.'
Later, I got some dried calf DNA. I placed a bit of the fluff on my tongue. It melted into a gluey ooze that stuck to the roof of my mouth in a blob. The blob felt slippery on my tongue, and the taste of pure DNA appeared. It had a soft taste, unsweet, rather bland, with a touch of acid and a hint of salt. Perhaps like the earth's primordial sea. It faded away.

Page 67, in Richard Preston's biographical essay on Craig Venter, "The Genome Warrior" (originally published in The New Yorker in 2000)."
— Timothy Ferris (The Best American Science Writing 2001)

"If there's any interaction between genes and languages, it is often languages that influence genes, since linguistic differences between populations lessen the chance of genetic exchange between them."
— Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza

"Oral myths are closer to the genetic conclusions than the often ambiguous scientific evidence of archaeology."
— Bryan Sykes (Saxons, Vikings, and Celts: The Genetic Roots of Britain and Ireland)