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Our mistakes are legion, but our talent is immeasurable.
Dwarfed by the infinite dome of space with its majestic coliseum of stars, we’ve created our own constellations on the ground
On some summer days, the air hangs thickly visible, like the combined exhalations of millions of souls.
we’re urban primates who are still adapted to the wilderness, which we long for and need,
who and what we are shifts, and also how we may decide to know ourselves in the future.
Our telescopes listen with cupped ears for whispers from the beginning of time,
Whether they speak Armenian or Mandarin, people around the world use the same images of physical pain to describe a broken heart,
we find it hard to imagine both ends of the visual spectrum—the cosmic infinite or the minutely finite—it sounds impossible.
isn’t this what we wish from exciting new technology, for it to slide invisibly into our lives,
Language may be essential, but the invention of reading and writing was pure luxury.
we’re living in sensory poverty, learning about the world without experiencing it up close, right here, right now, in all its messy, majestic, riotous detail.
“Forty years ago,” Cerf said, “we wrote the script of the Internet. Thirty years ago we turned it on. We thought we were building a system to connect computers together. But we quickly learned that it’s a system for connecting people.
Plants are not mild-mannered. Some can be murderous, seductive, deceitful, venomous, unscrupulous, sophisticated, and downright barbaric.
Devious and dangerous as plants can be, they adorn every facet of our lives, from courtship to burial. They fill our rooms with piquant scents, dazzling tableaux, and gravity-defying aerial ballets and contortions as they unfold petals and climb toward the sun.
(Dr. Frankenstein’s sin wasn’t in creating the monster but in abandoning it).
Walking is really a series of recovered falls. In time we learn to do it expertly, without noticing
Over the course of an intimate relationship, we collect a lot of pieces of someone else. Until one day what remains is truly and thoroughly a mosaic, a chimera
However the affair turns out, we’re invisibly changed for having known each other.
