From the Bookshelf of Around the World in 80 Books…

“Where have you been? It’s seven-fucking-thirty.” Bill’s version of “good morning” has changed very little over the past twenty years.

“Where have you been? It’s seven-fucking-thirty.” Bill’s version of “good morning” has changed very little over the past twenty years.

No writer in the world agonizes over words the way a scientist does. Terminology is everything: we identify something by its established name, describe it using the universally agreed-upon terms, study it in a completely individual way, and then write about it using a code that takes years to master. When documenting our work, we “hypothesize” but never “guess”; we “conclude,” not just “decide.” We view the word “significant” to be so vague that it is useless but know that the addition of “highly” can signify half a million dollars of funding.

A seed knows how to wait. ...

A seed is alive while it waits. Every acorn on the ground is just as alive as the three-hundred-year-old oak tree that towers over it. Neither the seed nor the old oak is growing; they are both just waiting. Their waiting differs, however, in that the seed is waiting to flourish while the tree is only waiting to die.

Each beginning is the end of a waiting. We are each given exactly one chance to be. Each of us is both impossible and inevitable. Every replete tree was first a seed that waited.

The leaves of the world comprise countless billion elaborations of a single, simple machine designed for one job only—a job upon which hinges humankind. Leaves make sugar. Plants are the only things in the universe that can make sugar out of nonliving inorganic matter. All the sugar that you have ever eaten was first made within a leaf. Without a constant supply of glucose to your brain, you will die. Period. Under duress, your liver can make glucose out of protein or fat—but that protein or fat was originally constructed from a plant sugar within some other animal. It’s inescapable: at this very moment, within the synapses of your brain, leaves are fueling thoughts of leaves.

Probably within just the last ten million years, a plant had a new idea, and instead of spreading its leaf out, it shaped it into a spine, such as those we find today on the cholla cactus. It was this new idea that allowed a new kind of plant to grow preposterously large and live long in a dry place where it was also the only green thing around to eat for miles—an absurdly inconceivable success. One new idea allowed the plant to see a new world and draw sweetness out of a whole new sky.

... we progressed into the final chamber of the Jungle, where a huge gorilla named King sat in a cement hole not dissimilar to those used to impose solitary confinement upon the prisoners of my own species. King’s three-hundred-pound frame slumped against the tile as he used one foot to listlessly rub a crayon back and forth across a piece of paper. The walls of the room from which we viewed him were plastered with his finished “paintings,” each of which had been executed by King using a similar technique; taken together, they expressed an impressively consistent artistic view.

“At least he’s publishing,” I observed.

We read a plaque that described the heavy crosses that lowland gorillas must bear within their native Africa, which ranged from poaching to disease, yet it was difficult to imagine any corner of the Congo more dismal than the abject constriction within which King had been impounded in Florida. We read a second, rather apologetic plaque describing how King’s overflow art could be purchased in the gift shop and that some of the proceeds were earmarked toward the remodeling and expansion of his enclosure. If King had had a handgun, I was pretty sure that he would have blown his own head off, but seeing that he was armed only with a crayon, he appeared to be making the best of his situation.

They are the hardest-working plants on Earth. A vine can grow an entire foot in length on just one sunny day. Within their stems gush the highest rates of water transfer ever measured in a plant. Don’t be fooled by the few red or brown leaves you find on poison ivy in the fall—the plant is not dying; it’s just cheating with different pigments. Vines are evergreen, which means that they never take a day off: no long winter vacation like the deciduous trees that they have laboriously scaled. On top of everything, vines do not flower and bear seed until they reach the open sun above the canopy of the forest, and therefore only the very strongest have ever survived.

A barrel cactus has folds like an accordion, and deep within these folds are the pores that let air in and water evaporate out. When it becomes very dry, a cactus sheds its roots to prevent the parched soil from sucking all the water back out of it. A cactus can live for four days with no roots and still continue to grow.

A cactus doesn't live in the desert because it likes the desert; it lives there because the desert hasn’t killed it yet. Any plant that you find growing in the desert will grow a lot better if you take it out of the desert.

We love each other because we can’t help it. We don’t work at it and we don’t sacrifice for it. It is easy and all the sweeter to me because it is so undeserved. I discover within a second context that when something just won’t work, moving heaven and earth often won’t make it work—and similarly, there are some things that you just can’t screw up. I know that I could live without him: I have my own work, my own mission, and my own money. But I don’t want to. I really don’t want to.

I’m good at science because I’m not good at listening.

I have been told that I can’t do what I want to do because I am a woman, and I have been told that I have only been allowed to do what I have done because I am a woman.

Like anyone else who harbors precious secrets wrought from years of searching, I have longed for someone to tell.