"Within a single cell there may be 10,000 different proteins; thousands of the energy factories called mitochondria; and half a billion actin molecules, which provide scaffolding to support the cell and help it move and change shape." —Thank you, Rachel Ehrenberg, for "View to a Cell," in Science News, June 15, 2013, p.21.

"When we go down to the low-tide line, we enter a world that is as old as the earth itself -- the primeval meeting place of the elements of earth and water, a place of compromise and conflict and eternal change.  For us as living creatures it has special meaning as an area in or near which some entity that could be distinguished as life first drifted in shallow waters -- reproducing, evolving, yielding that endlessly varied stream of living things that has surged through time and space to occupy the earth." —Thank you, Rachel Carson, for The Edge of the Sea, 1955, p.vii.

"There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.  Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy." —Thank you, Albert Camus, for The Myth of Sisyphus, 1955, p.3.

"Elephants usually drink only once a day and do not seem to care about the water source.  They may stop within a few yards of a crystal clear lake and drink from a small muddy wallow instead." —Thank you, Alan M. Heatwole, for Elephants, 1991, p.44.