Andrew Wilson

“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?”
― Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder

“There was a sound of something spreading as an area of seven flagstones became hidden from view beneath a catalyptic mass of wine-drenched blubber.”
― Mervyn Peake, The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy

“I have no problem with god - it's his fan club that scares me.”
― A.B. Potts

“it was widely known that the gene-carrying chromosomes within cells contained DNA, but most biologists thought that DNA was too simple and boring a molecule to be responsible for such a complex phenomenon as heredity.”
― Paul Nurse, What is Life?: Understand Biology In Five Steps