There is no humility before nature. There is only a get-rich-quick, make-a-name-for-yourself-fast philosophy. Cheat, lie, falsify—it doesn’t matter. Not to you, or to your colleagues. No one will criticize you. No one has any standards. They are all trying to do the same thing: to do something big, and do it fast.

Linearity is an artificial way of viewing the world. Real life isn’t a series of interconnected events occurring one after another like beads strung on a necklace.

He imagines that nature is beyond him. Beyond his understanding. Beyond his control. Maybe he prays to nature, to the fertility of the forest that provides for him. He prays because he knows he doesn’t control it. He’s at the mercy of it.

Your powers are much less than your dreams of reason would have you believe.”

Along the side of the road, clouds of volcanic steam misted rainbows in the bright quartz lights.

“Why isn’t he worried about it?” “Maybe he is,” she said. “But he’s also thought about this for his whole life.” Gennaro nodded, and wondered what that would be like. Whether there was anything he had waited his whole life for. He decided there wasn’t anything.

But a skeleton was a poor thing, really, from which to try and deduce the total behavior of an organism.

“Broadly speaking, the ability of the park to control the spread of life-forms. Because the history of evolution is that life escapes all barriers. Life breaks free. Life expands to new territories. Painfully, perhaps even dangerously. But life finds a way.”

“At the earliest drawings of the fractal curve, few clues to the underlying mathematical structure will be seen.” IAN MALCOLM