Because IQ tests favor memory skills and logic, overlooking artistic creativity, insight, resiliency, emotional reserves, sensory gifts, and life experience, they can’t really predict success, let alone satisfaction.
Hit a tripwire of smell and memories explode all at once. A complex vision leaps out of the undergrowth.
There was nothing to do but wait. It is always like this for naturalists, and for poets – the long hours of travel and preparation, and then the longer hours of waiting. All for that one electric, pulse-revving vision when the universe suddenly declares itself.
There’s no place you can go on the prairie that you don’t hear the white noise of the wind, steady and rough as surf curling along a non-existant shore.
What a lonely species we are, searching for signals of life from other galaxies, adopting companion animals, visiting parks and zoos to commune with other beasts. In the process, we discover our shared identity.
Culture is what people invent when they have lost nature.
For the longest time I didn’t realize I was creative – I just thought I was strange.
Choice is a signature of our species.
The brain is only three pounds of blood, dream, and electricity, and yet from that mortal stew come Beethoven’s sonatas. Dizzie Gillespie’s jazz. Audrey Hepburn’s wish to spend the last month of her life in Somalia, saving children.
What would dawn have been like, had you awakened? It would have sung through your bones. All I can do this morning is let it sing through mine.
Flight is nothing but an attitude in motion.
We’re losing biodiversity globally at an alarming rate, and we need a cornucopia of different plants and animals, for the planet’s health and our own.
For better or worse, zoos are how most people come to know big or exotic animals. Few will ever see wild penguins sledding downhill to sea on their bellies, giant pandas holding bamboo lollipops in China or tree porcupines in the Canadian Rockies, balled up like giant pine cones.
As the most social apes, we inhabit a mirror-world in which every important relationship, whether with spouse, friend or child, shapes the brain, which in turn shapes our relationships.
All relationships change the brain – but most important are the intimate bonds that foster or fail us, altering the delicate circuits that shape memories, emotions and that ultimate souvenir, the self.
What is erotic? The acrobatic play of the imagination. The sea of memories in which we bathe. The way we caress and worship things with our eyes. Our willingness to be stirred by the sight of the voluptuous. What is erotic is our passion for the liveliness of life.
Look at your feet. You are standing in the sky. When we think of the sky, we tend to look up, but the sky actually begins at the earth. We walk through it, yell into it, rake leaves, wash the dog, and drive cars in it. We breathe it deep within us. With every breath, we inhale millions of molecules of sky, heat them briefly, and then exhale them back into the world.
I don’t understand all the fuss. If any creature is in danger, you save it, human or animal.
Why was it, she asked herself, that ’animals can sometimes subdue their predatory ways in only a few months, while humans, despite centuries of refinement, can quickly grow more savage than any beast.
We tend to think of memories as monuments we once forged and may find intact beneath the weedy growth of years. But, in a real sense, memories are tied to and describe the present. Formed in an idiosyncratic way when they happened, they’re also true to the moment of recall, including how you feel, all you’ve experienced, and new values, passions, and vulnerability. One never steps into the same stream of consciousness twice.