“We’re organisms; we’re conceived, we’re born, we live, we die, and we decay. But as we decay we feed the world of the living: plants and bugs and bacteria.”

“I wonder where we go when we die?”“…Pittsburgh?”“You mean if we’re good or if we’re bad?”

“They say the world is a stage. But obviously the play is unrehearsed and everybody is ad-libbing his lines.""Maybe that’s why it’s hard to tell if we’re living in a tragedy or a farce.""We need more special effects and dance numbers.”

“This earth that we live on is full of stories in the same way that, for a fish, the ocean is full of ocean. Some people say when we are born we’re born into stories. I say we’re also born from stories.”

“at points in our lives, we have to choose the hills we’re willing to die on.”

“Because we humans are big and clever enough to produce and utilize antibiotics and disinfectants, it is easy to convince ourselves that we have banished bacteria to the fringes of existence. Don't you believe it. Bacteria may not build cities or have interesting social lives, but they will be here when the Sun explodes. This is their planet, and we are on it only because they allow us to be.”

“We figure out what death means when we’re born, practically, and we live our whole lives in some kind of weird denial about it.”