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When a day that you happen to know is Wednesday starts off by sounding like Sunday, there is something seriously wrong somewhere.

'I wonder if a sillier and more ignorant catachresis than "Mother Nature" was ever perpetrated? It is because Nature is ruthless, hideous, and cruel beyond belief that it was necessary to invent civilisation. One thinks of wild animals as savage, but the fiercest of them begins to look almost domesticated when one considers the viciousness required of a survivor in the sea; as for the insects, their lives are sustained only by intricate processes of fantastic horror. There is no conception more fallacious than the sense of cosiness implied by "Mother Nature". Each species must strive to survive, and that it will do, by every means in its power, however foul — unless the instinct to survive is weakened by conflict with another instinct.'

'If you want to keep alive in the jungle, you must live as the jungle does. . . .'

"How many men, do you suppose, realise the limitations of using words to convey our meanings? They may find that there are inconvenient misunderstandings, and blame language, but how many admit that the words are just a substitute for the thing they really lack—mental communication? Precious few. My point is that they do not realise the lack of direct mental communication, because they've never had it. They look on spoken or written language as a natural method of expression, whereas it is really a mechanical process [...]"

"Bored! My God, to think that I could ever have been bored up there."

Fate is not above using inconsiderable details for her obscure purpose.

'There's a whole lot of people don't seem to understand that you have to talk to a man in his own language before he'll take you seriously.'

'We've got it all there in the books if we take the trouble to find out about it.'

'The wise lamb does not enrage the lion,' he said. 'It placates him, plays for time, and hopes for the best.'

'The law punishes the criminal after he has been successful: it is no use to us.'

'And, after all, what is a planet but an island in space?'

Everything changes when we look at the evidence; what looks impossible actually happened.