“The Core knows what Teilhard de Chardin and other sentimentalists refused to acknowledge: evolution is not… — Dan Simmons

“One of the few benefits of the fall of civilization as we know it,” he says, “is that there are private cellars with fine vintages everywhere one digs. It is not theft. It is archaeology.”

There are no ghosts, my love. Death is final. The soul is that ineffable combination of memory and personality which we carry through life...when life departs, the soul also dies. Except for what we leave in the memory of those who loved us.

As is always the case when you are with the actual human being behind the celebrity or legend, there is something human about the man or woman that makes things less than myth.