There is an old French curse: may your fondest wish come true. If this treatment is cheap and available to everyone, it will destroy the earth through overpopulation. If it is dear and available only...
Then there was that absurd syntax business again. No language without syntax. Well, what about Latin! These assholes didn’t even know Latin! Where did these guys go to school?
The Monster’s crimes were so horrific that a mere man could not possibly have committed them. Satan, in the end, had to be invoked.
The Maya created a vibrant and brilliant society that, in the end, failed to adjust to a changing environment and the needs of its people;
The Maya built with stone, while this region had been extensively settled by a separate, sophisticated culture that built great earthen mounds. This was an entirely new culture. Even as Strong’s work...
Sometimes, a society can see its end approaching from afar and still not be able to adapt, like the Maya; at other times, the curtain drops without warning and the show is over. No civilization has su...
Sometimes it takes courage—maybe all the courage you’ve got—to just live life.
She was like the boy who held his breath until he turned blue. Chimps are just as silly and absurd as human beings. Thank goodness we’re not the only ridiculous species in the world!
She learned her first two signs five weeks later, on—let’s see here—June 4, 1967. They were hug and me. On June 6, she spontaneously signed Hug me Jennie to Mrs. Archibald, her surrogate mother. Mrs....
She created a new world for herself. It blew my mind to see this animal acquire language. And then literally reshape her world with it.
Sandy told him Jennie was part of a secret government scientific project and that if they did anything to her the FBI would put him in jail.
Religion arose as an effort to explicate the inexplicable, control the uncontrollable, make bearable the unbearable. Belief in a higher power became the most powerful innovation in late human evolutio...
My idle curiosity might lead to something more official, if the lieutenant feels his work is being hindered by an officious, small-minded, self-important bureaucrat. Not you, of course. I speak in gen...
Mrs. Trask turned to him. When Mr. Pendergast asks for something, we do not say no.
Most science reporters for newspapers and magazines did not have the scientific background to understand the ramifications of the story. Those involved with the story of Jennie’s life were anxious to...
Lines from an old film came back to him unbidden: That I should want you at all suddenly strikes me as the height of improbability. You’re an improbable person, and so am I.
Leishmaniasis has a long and terrible history with human beings, stretching back as far as human records exist and causing suffering and death for thousands of years.
Jennie is very like a human child in challenging and testing her elders. I feel that R. wants to love Jennie, and wants Jennie to love her. She does not, I fear, have the right touch with Jennie. She...
I’m never better than when I’m alone.
It encourages us to develop evolution’s greatest gift to us: our intellects. It instructs us to appreciate this life as fully as possible, because we will never have another. This, then, is my religio...