“Woods are not like other spaces. To begin with, they are cubic. Their trees surround you, loom over you, press in from all sides. Woods choke off views & leave you muddled & without bearings.”

Nearly a quarter of American men were in the Armed forces. The rest were in school, in prison, or were George W. Bush.

We are so used to the notion of our own inevitability as life’s dominant species that it is hard to grasp that we are here only because of timely extraterrestrial bangs and other random flukes.

There is the odd exception, like Albert Einstein, but as a breed, scientists tend not be very good at presenting themselves.

Everything seems to be designed for the benefit of the automobile and not the benefit of the human being.

England was full of words I’d never heard before – streaky bacon, short back and sides, Belisha beacon, serviettes, high tea, ice-cream cornet.

Every atom you possess has almost certainly passed through several stars and been part of millions of organisms on its way to becoming you.

It is not as if farming brought a great improvement in living standards either. A typical hunter-gatherer enjoyed a more varied diet and consumed more protein and calories than settled people, and took in five times as much viatmin C as the average person today.

Human beings would split the atom and invent television, nylon, and instant coffee before they could figure out the age of their own planet.

So, if people didn’t settle down to take up farming, why then did they embark on this entirely new way of living? We have no idea – or actually, we have lots of ideas, but we don’t know if any of them are right.

In order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result — eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly — in you.

I know that communism never worked and I would have disliked living under it myself but none the less it seems that there was a kind of sadness in the thought that the only economic system that appeared to work was one based on self interest and greed.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but you would think that if one nation ought by now to have mastered the science of drainage, Britain would be it.

Although a few antibiotics have been toughened up a bit, the pharmaceutical industry hasn’t given us an entirely new antibiotic since the 1970s.

Hunters will tell you that a moose is a wily and ferocious forest creature. Nonsense. A moose is a cow drawn by a three-year-old.

Suddenly, in the space of a moment, I realized what it was that I loved about Britain – which is to say, all of it.

Enough to explode with the force of thirty very large hydrogen bombs, assuming you knew how to liberate it and really wished to make a point.

You remind me of the Siberian hunting spider, which adopts a highly convincing limp in three of its eight legs in order to attract its main prey.

Today, we’re struggling a lot, both men and women, with finding out what we’re supposed to be. Like when you go on a first date.

What probably confuses people is they know a lot about me, but it quite pleases me that there’s more they don’t know.

What is it we value? Innovation. Originality. Novelty. But most importantly…timeliness. I fear you may be too late, my confused, unfortunate, friend.

Love is when two people who care for each other get confused.

I’m a part of the GOP and let me tell you what my stance is. My stance is that, we the people have the responsibility to take care of the indigent in our society. It’s not the government’s job.

When you are free of form and not confused, you are focused. To be free of form externally is ‘Zen.’ Not to be confused internally is ‘meditation.’ External Zen and internal meditation, this is what we mean by ‘Zen meditation.

The surest way to become Tense, Awkward, and Confused is to develop a mind that tries too hard – one that thinks too much.