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“Evening, Miss Welkes.”

“Can I help you meet some new friend, tonight?”

“Yes’m.”

“I know a man named Longfellow,” she said. Or, “I know a man named Whittier

The five would tongue their food over into their cheeks, leap up, and draw out chairs for the young belles, everyone laughed until the chandelier cried with pain

There were as many facets to her as any chandelier, and if you went about it right she could be set laughing, and it was like stirring the Chinese hanging crystals in the wind on the summer night porch, all tinkling and melody. No, Miss Welkes was cobweb and dust to them, and Douglas almost died in his chair fastening his eyes upon her all through the soup and salad

And there, at the far end of the table, with her gray eyes always down to watch her hand stir her coffee with a spoon or break her gingerbread and lay on the butter, was Miss Leonora Welkes, with whom men never sat on backyard swings or walked through the town ravine on summer nights. There was Miss Leonora whose eyes watched out the window as summer couples drifted by on the darkening sidewalks night after night, an

Such a man has a double existence: he may suffer misery and be overwhelmed by disappointments, yet when he has retired into himself, he will be like a celestial spirit that has a halo around him, within whose circle no grief or folly ventures.

My swelling heart involuntarily pours itself out thus. But I must finish. Heaven bless my beloved sister!

I am going to unexplored regions, to “the land of mist and snow,” but I shall kill no albatross; therefore do not be alarmed for my safety or if I should come back to you as worn and woeful as the “Ancient Mariner.” You will smile at my allusion, but I will disclose a secret. I have often attributed my attachment to, my passionate enthusiasm for, the dangerous mysteries of ocean to that production of the most imagin

I shall commit my thoughts to paper, it is true; but that is a poor medium for the communication of feeling. I desire the company of a man who could sympathise with me, whose eyes would reply to mine. You may deem me romantic, my dear sister, but I bitterly feel the want of a friend. I have no one near me, gentle yet courageous, possessed of a cultivated as well as of a capacious mind, whose tastes are like my own, t

I feel a cold northern breeze play upon my cheeks, which braces my nerves and fills me with delight. Do you understand this feeling? This breeze, which has travelled from the regions towards which I am advancing, gives me a foretaste of those icy climes. Inspirited by this wind of promise, my daydreams become more fervent and vivid. I try in vain to be persuaded that the pole is the seat of frost and desolation; it e

Is Death important? No. Everything that happens before Death is what counts. And we’ve done fine tonight. Even Death can’t spoil it.

! I’ll be damned if death wears my sadness for glad rags

“Oh, Dad, Dad, I don’t care how old you are, ever! I don’t care what, I don’t care anything! Oh, Dad,” he cried, weeping. “I love you!”

That always worried me in the old myths. I asked myself, why would Mephistopheles want a soul? What does he do with it when he gets it, of what use is it?

We taste custard, we taste life. Why love the woman who is your wife? Her nose breathes in the air of a world that I know; therefore I love that nose. Her ears hear music I might sing half the night through; therefore I love her ears. Her eyes delight in seasons of the land; and so I love those eyes. Her tongue knows quince, peach, chokeberry, mint and lime; I love to hear it speaking. Because her flesh knows heat, c

There was only one thing sure.
Two lines of Shakespeare said it. He should write them in the middle of the clock of books, to fix the heart of his apprehension:
By the pricking of my thumbs,
Something wicked this way comes.
So vague, yet so immense.
He did not want to live with it.
Yet he knew that, during this night, unless he lived with it very well, he might have to live with it all the rest of his life

“Pa,” he said, “don’t sound so sad.”
“Me? I’m the original sad man. I read a book and it makes me sad. See a film: sad. Plays? they really work me over.”
“Is there anything,” said Will, “doesn’t make you sad?”
“One thing. Death.”
“Boy!” Will started. “I should think that would!”

“It was the ‘Funeral March’! Played backwards!”
“Which ‘Funeral March’?”
“Which! Jim, Chopin only wrote one tune! The ‘Funeral March’!”
“But why played backward?”
“Mr. Cooger was marching away from the grave, not toward it, wasn’t he, getting younger, smaller, instead of older and dropping dead?”
“Willy, you’re terrific!”

Something important—” Jim breathed soft fire—“made him forget. So he just walked off and left this here.”
“What? What’s so important you forget everything?”

Sometimes you see a kite so high, so wise it almost knows the wind. It travels, then chooses to land in one spot and no other and no matter how you yank, run this way or that, it will simply break its cord, seek its resting place and bring you, blood-mouthed, running.
“Jim! Wait for me!”

Sometimes you see a kite so high, so wise it almost knows the wind. It travels, then chooses to land in one spot and no other and no matter how you yank, run this way or that, it will simply break its cord, seek its resting place and bring you, blood-mouthed, running.
“Jim! Wait for me!”

Jim doesn’t know with his mind. But his body knows. And while Will’s putting a bandage on his latest scratch, Jim’s ducking, waving, bouncing away from the knockout blow which must inevitably come

He knew what the wind was doing to them where it was taking them, to all the secret places that were never so secret again in life. Somewhere in him, a shadow turned mournfully over. You had to run with a night like this, so the sadness could not hurt.

First of all, it was October, a rare month for boys. Not that all months aren’t rare. But there be bad and good, as the pirates say. Take September, a bad month: school begins. Consider August, a good month: school hasn’t begun yet. July, well, July’s really fine: there’s no chance in the world for school. June, no doubting it, June’s best of all, for the school doors spring wide and September’s a billion years away

Open and close your mouth:
your teeth always come together in the same position, with
upper and lower teeth fitting together precisely. Because
the upper and lower cusps, basins, and ridges match closely,
we are able to break up food with maximal efficiency. In
fact, a mismatch between upper and lower teeth can shatter
our teeth, and enrich our dentists.

Reptiles also lack the precise occlusion—the
fit between upper and lower teeth—that humans and other
mammals have. Also, whereas we mammals replace our
teeth only once, reptiles typically receive visits from the
tooth fairy for their entire lives, replacing their teeth
continually as they wear and break down.

Our limbs exist in three dimensions: they have a top and a
bottom, a pinky side and a thumb side, a base and a tip. The
bones at the tips, in our fingers, are different from the
bones at the shoulder. Likewise, our hands are different
from one side to the other. Our pinkies are shaped
differently from our thumbs.

But there is a big limitation to working with
fossils. We cannot do experiments on long-dead animals.
Experiments are great because we can actually manipulate
something to see the results. For this reason, my laboratory
is split directly in two: half is devoted to fossils, the other
half to embryos and DNA. Life in my lab can be
schizophrenic.

From common parts came a very unique
construction. We are not separate from the rest of the living
world; we are part of it down to our bones and, as we will
see shortly, even our genes.

Do the facts of our ancient history mean that humans are
not special or unique among living creatures? Of course not.
In fact, knowing something about the deep origins of
humanity only adds to the remarkable fact of our existence:
all of our extraordinary capabilities arose from basic
components that evolved in ancient fish and other
creatures.

Finally, the full complement
of wrist and ankle bones found in a human hand or foot is
seen in reptiles more than 250 million years old. The basic
skeleton of our hands and feet emerged over hundreds of
millions of years, first in fish and later in amphibians and
reptiles.