The Signature of All Things

by Elizabeth Gilbert

“These are two things that I have always observed to be in singular accord: supercelestial thoughts and subterranean conduct.”

The trick at every turn was to endure the test of living for as long as possible. The odds of survival were punishingly slim, for the world was naught but a school of calamity and an endless burning furnace of tribulation. But those who survived the world shaped it—even as the world, simultaneously, shaped them.

Evolution is a brutal mathematics, and the long road of time is littered with the fossilized remnants of incalculable failed experiments.”