Bee!’s Reviews > The People in the Trees > Status Update

“To be a scientist is to learn to live one’s life with questions that will never be answered, with the knowledge that one was too early or too late, with the anguish of not having been able to guess at the solution that, once presented, seems so obvious that one can only curse oneself for not seeing what one ought to have, if only one had looked in a slightly different direction.”

“…but I suppose I had thought until that point that there were a few absolutes in the world—that certain behaviors or acts, like murder, were inherently wrong, and others inherently correct. But my time on Ivu’ivu taught me that all ethics or morals are culturally relative.”

“But time, I’ve come to realize, is not for us to fill in such great, blank slabs: we
speak of managing time, but it is the opposite—our lives are filled with busyness because those thin chinks of time are all we can truly master.”

“To fear death, you must first have something to tether you to life.”