“And so language for me doesn’t reflect the world, it extends the world, so that it becomes larger and more fantastic and less mired in this school shooting bullshit. It actually builds a future – that’s how evolution occurs.”

About twenty pages into Luke B. Goebel’s Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours, I realized I was reading with one hand holding my forehead and one balled at my waist, kind of clenched, and gazing down into the paper like a man soon to be converged upon.

If we insist on being as sure as is conceivable… we must be content to creep along the ground, and never soar.

When I was a kid my primary goal in life was to find a book that was alive. Not alive in the human sense, but like a thing that would send me to a place not otherwise accessible on Earth.

I’ve actually started to think that it’s a purer state for people. Because he operates as if he’s a child and everything is new, which seems more honest.

It is important not to show too many inches at once.

I like smartasses, because I can be smartass back and rashy.

The things that language stands for do not require humans, and in fact are often trampled down by humans.

I logically don’t believe that all this stuff [surrounding us] is generated from dust. But I’m also not like “Jesus Christ came down to save us.” It’s almost selfish to think that human beings, on this plane of reality, are the end of it.

What if life after death is all based within memory: you die, and you don’t ascend on a bed of clouds to Jesus, but your brain has a terrain that it can use to propel itself further.

I am a serial monogamist of sorts, and have been with my girlfriend for almost four years.

I am in a traditional financial services business – but we at Fidelity can see that the evolution of technology is setting our industry up for disruption.

If the history-deniers who doubt the fact of evolution are ignorant of biology, those who think the world began less than ten thousand years ago are worst than ignorant, they are the deluded to the point of perversity.

Some call it evolution, And others call it God.

We admit that we are like apes, but we seldom realize that we are apes.

Evolution could so easily be disproved if just a single fossil turned up in the wrong date order. Evolution has passed this test with flying colours.

My religious convictions and scientific views cannot at present be more specifically defined than as those of a believer in creative evolution.

We are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment.

The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is in principle capable of explaining the existence of organized complexity.