“Our essential connection with animals is ancient, and it runs deep. It extends from body to behavior, from psychology to society—forming the basis of our daily journey of survival. This calls for physicians and patients to think beyond the human bedside to barnyards, jungles, oceans, and skies. Because the fate of our world’s health doesn’t depend solely on how we humans fare. Rather it will be determined by how all the patients on the planet live, grow, get sick, and heal.”

“In a world where no creatures are truly isolated and diseases spread around as fast as jets can fly, we are all canaries and the entire planet is our coal mine. Any species can be a sentinel of danger—-but only if the widest array of health--care professionals is paying attention.”

“Conception is not some genteel, quiet pastime; it’s a fierce and unforgiving team sport.”

“Shoes would interfere with her conversation, for she constantly addresses the ground under her feet. Asking forgiveness. Owning, disowning, recanting, recharting a hateful course of events to make sense of her complicity. We all are, I suppose. Trying to invent our version of the story. All human odes are essentially one, "My life; what I stole from history, and how I live with it.”

“Connection is health. And what our society does its best to disguise from us is how ordinary, how commonly attainable, health is. We lose our health - and create profitable diseases and dependences - by failing to see the direct connections between living and eating, eating and working, working and loving. In gardening, for instance, one works with the body to feed the body. The work, if it is knowledgeable, makes for excellent food. And it makes one hungry. The work thus makes eating both nourishing and joyful, not consumptive, and keeps the eater from getting fat and weak. This is health, wholeness, a source of delight. (pg.132, The Body and the Earth)”

“What we lose in our great human exodus from the land is a rooted sense, as deep and intangible as religious faith, of why we need to hold on to the wild and beautiful places that once surrounded us.”

“Light is the only connection we have with the Universe beyond our solar system, and the only connection our ancestors had with anything beyond Earth. Follow the light and we can journey from the confines of our planet to other worlds that orbit the Sun without ever dreaming of spacecraft. To look up is to look back in time, because the ancient beams of light are messengers from the Universe's distant past.”