Natalie Angier Quotes

#1. Scientists have discovered that the small brave act of cooperating with another person, of choosing trust over cynicism, generosity over selfishness, makes the brain light up with quiet joy.

Natalie Angier

#2. Remember, children, all the stories are true.
Simon tried to wrap his head around the idea that there might, somewhere in Germany, be a large bean stalk with an angry giant at the top.

Cassandra Clare

#3. You have your opinion, I have mine, and it takes all kinds of nuts and dips to make a party, right?

Natalie Angier

#4. We are made of stardust; why not take a few moments to look up at the family album?

Natalie Angier

#5. An internally conceived and gestated fetus is a protected fetus, and a protected fetus is a fetus freed to loll about long enough to bloom a giant brain. So we lend new meaning to the term egghead: from the cloistered egg is born the bulging frontal lobe.

Natalie Angier

#6. Women never bought Freud's idea of penis envy: who would want a shotgun when you can have an automatic?

Natalie Angier

#7. We lived so long and so self-consciously that we assumed we must live forever, and we buried our dead with enough talismans and spare change for eternity.

Natalie Angier

#8. He said. Academy alumni with quantitative skills go on to become stockbrokers. There are damned few patrician scientists.

Natalie Angier

#9. Most keep their condition secret from all but a few close friends. Interestingly, many of them say the thing they regret most is not their inability to have children but the lack of menstruation, the event they see as a monthly voucher of femaleness.

Natalie Angier

#10. The beauty of the natural world lies in the details.

Natalie Angier

#11. The after-silence, when the feast is o'er,And void the places where the minstrels stood,Differs in nought from what hath been before,And is nor ill nor good.

William Watson

#12. Whatever else I might have thought of [President George W] Bush's call, with its assumption that prayer is some sort of miracle Vicks VapoRub for the national charley horse, it's clear that his hands were reaching for any hands but mine.

Natalie Angier

#13. Evolution is a tinkerer, an ad-hocker, and a jury-rigger. It works with what it has on hand, not with what it has in mind. Some of its inventions prove elegant, while in others you can see the seams and dried glue.

Natalie Angier

#14. Scientists ... resist ... making more of the data than the data make of themselves.

Natalie Angier

#15. Religion often gets credit for curing rascals when old age is the real medicine.

Austin O'Malley

#16. I may not believe in life after death, but what a gift it is to be alive now.

Natalie Angier

#17. Modeling was successful for me. I didn't have to wait tables or anything like that, so that was nice. And I got to see the entire world.

Channing Tatum

#18. As [The Nation columnist Katha] Pollitt points out, when one starts looking beneath the surface of things and adding together the out-front atheists with the indifferent nonbelievers, you end up with a much larger group of people than Jews, Muslims, Buddhists and Unitarians put together.

Natalie Angier

#19. Surveys show that surveys never lie.

Natalie Angier

#20. Our minds hurtled outward in all directions. We became absurdly creative, Homo artifactus, intolerant of bare cave walls and naked clay pots.

Natalie Angier

#21. Touch is ... one of the most ancient transactions, a defiance of the plasma membrane and the loneliness it brought.

Natalie Angier

#22. We may love men and we may live with men, but some of them have said stupendously inaccurate things about us, our bodies, and our psyches.

Natalie Angier

#23. Science is not a body of facts. Science is a state of mind. It is a way of viewing the world, of facing reality square on but taking nothing on its face. It is about attacking a problem with the most manicured of claws and tearing it down into sensible, edible pieces.

Natalie Angier

#24. Open the ovoid mother and find the ovoid girl; open the child and the next egg grins up its invitation to crack it. You can never tell a priori how many iterations await you; you hope they continue forever. My daughter, my matryoshka.

Natalie Angier

#25. Lola swore she would never return to that terrible country. On one of our last nights as novios she said, Ten million Trujillos is all we are.

Junot Diaz

#26. We are all yeses. We are worthy enough, we passed inspection, we survived the great fetal oocyte extinctions. In that sense, at least
call it a mechanospiritual sense
we are meant to be. We are good eggs, every one of us.

Natalie Angier

#27. Who needs a handgun when you've got a semiautomatic?

Natalie Angier

#28. Women have talent and intelligence but, due to social constraints and prejudices, it is still a long distance away from the goal of gender equality.

Pratibha Patil

#29. Perhaps eggs are like neurons, which also are not replenished in adulthood: they know too much. Eggs must plan the party. Sperm need only to show up- wearing top hat and tails, of course.

Natalie Angier

#30. Giving a girl the impression that girlhood is an extended bounce on Barney's knee is like prepping a young gazelle for life on the Serengeti by dipping it in cream.

Natalie Angier

#31. The surest and most insidious enemy of freedom is not dictatorship, but complacency.

Natalie Angier

#32. Eternal love is a myth, but we make our myths, and we love them to death.

Natalie Angier

#33. In a sense, evolution adheres to the classic twelve-step program: it takes things one day at a time. It does not strive for perfection; it does not strive at all. There is no progress, no plans, no scala natura, or scale of nature, that ranks organisms from lowly to superior, primitive to advanced.

Natalie Angier

#34. Occupation of vast reaches of space means nothing. It is control of population centers and essential resources that determines victory or defeat.

Greg Bear