"I'll never know, and neither will you, of the life you don't choose. We'll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn't carry us. There's nothing to do but salute it from the shore."

"The expansion of life, moving out from Earth into its inheritance, is an even greater theme than the expansion of England across the Atlantic. As Hakluyt wrote that there is under our noses the great …"

"If we want to have a predictable life... then we have to build in these... pockets of reducibility. If we were... existing in this irreducible world, we'd never be able to... know what's going to happ…"

"There is no more mistaken path to happiness than worldliness, revelry, high life."

"I decline the election. — It has ever been my rule through life, to observe a proportion between my efforts and my objects. I have never been remarkable for a bold, active, and sanguine pursuit of adv…"