“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.

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.

The world and the universe is an extremely beautiful place, and the more we understand about it the more beautiful does it appear.

It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane.

Nothing is easier than to admit in words the truth of the universal struggle for life, or more difficult, at least I have found it so – than constantly to bear this conclusion in mind.

Even if it were true that evolution, or the teaching of evolution, encouraged immorality that would not imply that the theory of evolution was false.

Evolution is not a genetically controlled distortion of one adult form into another; it is a genetically controlled alteration in a developmental program.

I believe greatness is an evolutionary process that changes and evolves era to era.

Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages.