Still, though no one is an island, most are peninsulas. Our lives wouldn’t make sense without personal memories pinned like butterflies against the velvet backdrop of social history.

What a lonely species we are, searching for signals of life from other galaxies, adopting companion animals, visiting parks and zoos to commune with other beasts. In the process, we discover our shared identity.

Knee-deep in the cosmic overwhelm, I’m strickenby the ricochet wonder of it all: the plaineverythingness of everything, in cahootswith the everythingness of everything else.- From Diffraction (for Carl Sagan)

I’m an Earth ecstatic, and my creed is simple: All life is sacred, life loves life, and we are capable of improving our behavior toward one another. As basic as that is, for me it’s...

Hurricane season brings a humbling reminder that, despite our technologies, most of nature remains unpredictable.

I consider fiction a very high-class form of lying. I enjoy and admire it enormously, but I don’t think I’m very good at it.

It began in mystery and it will end in mystery, but what a rare and beautiful country lies in between.

Because we can’t escape our ancient hunger to live close to nature, we encircle the house with lawns and gardens, install picture windows, adopt pets and Boston ferns, and scent everything that touches our lives.

As fleeting emotions stalk it, a face can leak fear or the guilt of a forming lie.

Much more. We’re joined at the heart.””Bad luck for you, I’m afraid. My ticker’s pretty wonky.””Too much boozing.”His eyes twinkled, and he drew me close. “Not enough kissling.

Brain scans show synchrony between the brains of mother and child; but what they can’t show is the internal bond that belongs to neither alone, a fusion in which the self feels so permeable it...

So much in a relationship changes when a partner is seriously ill, helpless yet blameless, and indefatigably needy. I felt old. [p. 99] The animal part of him in pain accepted my caring. But the...

For me, life offers so many complexly appealing moments that two beautiful objects may be equally beautiful for different reasons and at different times. How can one choose?

We tend to think of heroes only in terms of violent combat, whether it’s against enemies or a natural disaster. But human beings also perform radical acts of compassion; we just don’t talk about them,...

Living with anyone for many years takes skill. To keep peace in the household, couples learn to adapt to one another, hopefully in positive ways.

I was moving in a narrow range between busy distractedness and a pervasive sadness whose granules seemed to enter each cell, weighing it down… I ghosted between islands of anxiety… a fatigue that dulled my...

We live on the leash of our senses.

The heart is a museum, filled with the exhibit’s of a lifetime’s love.

Why was it, she asked herself, that “animals can sometimes subdue their predatory ways in only a few months, while humans, despite centuries of refinement, can quickly grow more savage than any beast?

Gardeners may create order briefly out of chaos, but nature always gets the last word, and what it says is usually untidy by human standards. But I find all states of nature beautiful, and because...

Sometimes with a flutter of agitated worry that felt like a beetle was trapped inside my ribs. p. 90

At some point, one asks, “Toward what end is my life lived?” A great freedom comes from being able to answer that question. A sleeper can be decoyed out of bed by the sheer beauty...

I don’t want to get to the end of my life and find that I lived just the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.

Like many animals, wild ponies can sense a drop in barometric pressure. When a storm threatens, they know to seek shelter in hilly areas and huddle together with their rumps facing the oncoming wind.

Suffering took hold of me like a magic spell abolishing all differences between friends and strangers.

My mother always said I must be part Mongolian because of my lotus-pale complexion and squid-ink black hair.

Apes do it. Scorpions do it. Fireflies do it,

Nothing is more memorable than a smell. One scent can be unexpected, momentary and fleeting, yet conjure up a childhood summer beside a lake in the mountains.

I’m fascinated how often and with what whole-heartedness people will risk their lives to perform acts of courage, sacrifice, and compassion for total strangers.

Five weeks in the hospital fled as if down a sinkhole into the middle of the earth. … Can waiting by definition slow, flash by? … Time becomes even more elastic than usual–minutes can stretch...

I may enter a zone of transcendence, in which I marvel at all the accidents of fate, since the beginning of life on earth, that led to my genes being created and my standing in...

For better or worse, zoos are how most people come to know big or exotic animals. Few will ever see wild penguins sledding downhill to sea on their bellies, giant pandas holding bamboo lollipops in...

The garden is a living, pulsing, singing, scratching, warring, erotic, and generally rowdy thing. I may find peace in its midst, but I regard it as a whole with many parts, a plural organism.

Listen, I’d rather lie naked in a plowed field under an incontinent horse for a week than have to read that paragraph again!

Nature is more like a seesaw than a crystal, a never-ending conga line of bold moves and corrections.

Touch seems to be as essential as sunlight

Love is the best school, but the tuition is high and the homework can be painful.

The simple, stupefying truth that, as a woman, I am a minute ocean, in the dark tropic of whose womb eggs lay coded as roe, floating in the sea that wet-nursed us all, moved me...

The Lutz heck that emerges from his writings and actions drifted like a weather vane: charming when need be, cold-blooded when need be, tigerish or endearing, depending on his goal. Still, it is surprising that...

Symbolic of life, hair bolts from our head[s]. Like the earth, it can be harvested, but it will rise again. We can change its color and texture when the mood strikes us, but in time...

Look in the mirror. The face that pins you with its double gaze reveals a chastening secret.

When all is said and done, we exist only in relation to the world, and our senses evolved as scouts who bridge that divide and provide volumes of information, warnings and rewards.

In our heart we know that life loves life. Yet we feast on some of the other life-forms with which we share our planet; we kill to live. Taste is what carries us across that...

I like knowing that the further back one traces any lineage, the narrower the path grows, to the haunt of just a few shaggy ancestors, with luck on their side, little gizmos in their cells...

I don’t want to be a passenger in my own life

We ogle plants and animals up close on television, the Internet and in the movies. We may not worship the animals we see, but we still regard them as necessary physical and spiritual companions. Technological...

Wonder is the heaviest element on the periodic table. Even a tiny fleck of it stops time.