The Meaning of Death

"Does death have any meaning? 

Well, yes, it does. Sex without death gets you single-celled algae and fungi; sex with a mortal soma gets you the rest of the eukaryotic creatures. Death is the price paid to have trees and clams and birds and grasshoppers, and death is the price paid to have human consciousness, to be aware of all that shimmering awareness and all that love."

Its Own Improbability

"I have come to understand that the self, my self, is inherently sacred. By virtue of its own improbability, its own miracle, its own emergence." (pg. 59)

Getting Something to Happen

"Life, we can now say, is getting something to happen against the odds and remembering how to do it." (pg. 63)

All There is to Biochemistry

"And that's basically all there is to biochemistry. Every cell is packed with thousands of different kinds of enzymes, each enzyme displaying a distinctive surface topology...and each thereby able to catalyze one or several specific chemical reactions." (pg. 39)

Self Assembly

"Amino acids that prefer to be next to one another, like a group of greasy ones, might associate to form one domain; amino acids with negative charges might line up next to amino acids with positive charges to form a second domain; a bulky amino acid might cause a protuberant domain to stick out farther. This all happens spontaneously -- the process is called self-assembly -- and the result is a protein with a distinctive overall shape and size that displays a collection of very specific domains." 

A Long, Existential Shudder

"We are told that life is so many manifestations of chemistry and we shudder, a long existential shudder." (pg. 33)

Our Thermal and Chemical Circumstances

"Life from non life, like wine from water, has long been considered a miracle wrought by gods or God. Now it is seen to be the near inevitable consequence of our thermal and chemical circumstances." (pg. 28-29)

When You Look

"...when you look down, it feels like you're looking at the whole thing, but when you look up, you realize you've only been looking at a part." (pg. 45-46)