From the preface
Four billion years, and it ends beside a refrigerator.
Just a mouse is not a description. It is a permission slip.
Science has never looked upon the natural world and made it less astonishing.
From the prologue and the opening chapters
Some of it is still arriving. It is the oldest thing anyone has ever seen.
Gravity is the most patient thing in the universe.
The day you are having is longer than it used to be.
Everything necessary was present, and had been for some time. Nothing was alive.
You are warmer than the room you are sitting in.
You were thirty-seven degrees yesterday. You will be thirty-seven degrees tomorrow. The difference is not evening out.
Something was being missed. But it took a physicist to say what.
From The Lottery We All Won
There is no such thing as a common animal.
The lottery did not have a first prize.
We are one of the survivors, standing in a field full of survivors.
They were not steps toward you. They were lives, complete in themselves, that happened to be followed by other lives.
Just something alive, this afternoon, trying to get through the week.
Not one of them is a spare.
Nothing in it is replaceable, because nothing in it was ever produced twice.
Your ancestors were not among them. Not once.
From the front and back matter
When we look at nature, we are not looking at biology. We are looking at family.
A letter every few weeks, from inside the book.