Thomas

“Solitude is independence. It had been my wish and with the years I had attained it. It was cold. Oh, cold enough! But it was also still, wonderfully still and vast like the cold stillness of space in which the stars revolve.”
― Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

“Kotcheff recalled after a northern trek with Trudeau. “He was by far the best dish-washer, fire-maker and camp organizer. He put some of us to shame.… Not only was he fit, he turned out to be one of the best canoeists and sternsmen in the group. If anyone succumbed to the elements, it wouldn’t be Pierre.”
― Roy MacGregor, Canoe Country: The Making of Canada

“What sets a canoeing expedition apart,” Pierre Elliott Trudeau wrote in an essay a quarter century before he became Canada’s fifteenth prime minister, “is that it purifies you more rapidly and inescapably than any other. Travel a thousand miles by train and you are a brute; pedal five hundred on a bicycle and you remain basically a bourgeois; paddle a hundred in a canoe and you are already a child of nature.”
― Roy MacGregor, Canoe Country: The Making of Canada

“It was an accident. It had to do with random mutations in our DNA that, at the time, didn’t matter. We were already getting plenty of vitamin C coming up out of our liver. It came from our food and was not broken down in our stomach, intestines, or liver. It emerged into the bloodstream intact, readily available to all of our cells. We lost the ability to make it ourselves, without becoming extinct, because we didn’t need to make it. And more than that, we reproduced faster than our associates who had not lost the ability to make it.”
― Kary Mullis, Dancing Naked in the Mind Field