Some people were simply created with the right genes and the proper social skills, I figured. They ended up at a lunch table with a group of good-looking individuals, like them, who did what all good-looking individuals managed: making the rest of us...
The past is a presence between us. In all my mother does and says, the past continually discloses itself in the smallest ways. She sees it directly; I see its shadow. Still, it pulses in my fingertips, feeds on my consciousness. It is a backdrop for ...
Sometimes I feel she hasn't left...especially when I wear the photo charm necklace with her picture in it. I can't tell you how many young men have stared into that picture and the reaction is always the same: a slow beam rises across their faces and...
The modern West has been deeply split about freedom and responsibility. On the one hand, it has championed human freedom in many forms - human rights, sexual freedom, political liberty, freedom to choose in many spheres. On the other hand, many of it...
The main character, Gene Moore, is shown how much of his identity is wrapped up in his career and potential in that career. When he comes home from war no longer able to see himself as a baseball prospect, he isn't sure who he is. This is thoroughly ...
Nesse’s research focuses on the evolutionary origins of depression. Why does depression exist at all? If it’s stayed in our gene pool for so long, he argues, there must be some evolutionary benefit. Nesse believes that depression may be an adapti...
Fix-It Felix: [after Ralph abandoned the game] Everyone calm down. Ralph probably fell asleep in the washroom of Tapper's again. [a tram pulls up] Fix-It Felix: See, here he is now. [Q*Bert hops out] Fix-It Felix: Why, it's Q*Bert! What brings you he...
The gene contains a single 'word', repeated over and over again: CAG, CAG, CAG, CAG ... The repetition continues sometimes just six times, sometimes thirty, sometimes more than a hundred times. Your destiny, your sanity and your life hang by the thre...
Look, if you say that science will eventually prove there is no God, on that I must differ. No matter how small they take it back, to a tadpole, to an atom, there is always something they can’t explain, something that created it all at the end of t...
We need science education to produce scientists, but we need it equally to create literacy in the public. Man has a fundamental urge to comprehend the world about him, and science gives today the only world picture which we can consider as valid. It ...
Like the Nazis, the cadres of jihad have a death wish that sets the seal on their nihilism. The goal of a world run by an oligarchy in possession of Teutonic genes, who may kill or enslave other 'races' according to need, is not more unrealizable tha...
The truth was loose: I was the son of a son of a bitch, an ancestral prodigy born to clobber my way through loathsome dungheaps of idiot labor. My genes were cocked and loaded. I was a meteor, a gunslinger, a switchblade boomerang hurled from the pec...
An aphrodisiac will disappear, delusional, like permanence or wealth - a shimmering, as if love were a ghost - and yet my passion for you seethes and sears without an end. Late April leaves can’t crave caress of dew, sunlight’s sweet splash, more...
The campus, an academy of trees, under which some hand, the wind's I guess, had scattered the pale light of thousands of spring beauties, petals stained with pink veins; secret, blooming for themselves. We sat among them. Your long fingers, thin body...
My fight isn’t so simple, it has very deep roots, from long ago, from earlier generations. Life weighs on me with the weight of my family history, my genes drag along a race of sons of plenty and sons of bitches who with a blade of a machete cleare...
Dr. Alan Grant: [finding egg shells] Oh my God. Do you know what this is? This is a dinosaur egg. The dinosaurs are breeding. Tim: But Grandpa said all the dinosaurs were girls. Dr. Alan Grant: Amphibian DNA. Lex: What's that? Dr. Alan Grant: Well, o...
Everyone thinks that it was the big strong caveman who got the girl, and for the most part, that may have been true, but physical strength doesn't explain how our species created civilization. I think there was always some scrawny dreamer sitting at ...
Lionel McCready: [about Helene] She's at the Fillmore all the time. Patrick Kenzie: She's at the Fillmore lounge? Lionel McCready: Yeah, she drinks every day. She's got the gene, you know? The disease. Our parents had it too. Patrick Kenzie: She use ...
Zazu: As the king's brother *you* should have been first in line. Mufasa: Well I was first in line. Until the little hairball was born. Mufasa: That hairball is my son and you're future king. Scar: [Begins walking away] Oh, I shall practice my curtse...
People of very different opinions--friends who can discuss politics, religion, and sex with perfect civility--are often reduced to red-faced rage when the topic of conversation is the serial comma or an expression like . People who merely roll their ...
I didn't simply want children - I probably could have found someone who would have been willing to do the baby thing - I wanted them with her. I longed to see the sparkle of her eyes in the eyes of a child; to have that infectious laugh of hers comin...
