“Ethics that focus on human interactions, morals that focus on humanity's relationship to a Creator, fall short of these things we've learned. They fail to encompass the big take-home message, so far, of a century and a half of biology and ecology: life is- more than anything else- a process; it creates, and depends on, relationships among energy, land, water, air, time and various living things. It's not just about human-to-human interaction; it's not just about spiritual interaction. It's about all interaction. We're bound with the rest of life in a network, a network including not just all living things but the energy and nonliving matter that flows through the living, making and keeping all of us alive as we make it alive. We can keep debating ideologies and sending entreaties toward heaven. But unless we embrace the fuller reality we're in- and reality's implications- we'll face big problems.”

“I don't understand why things always go from perfect to weird with us. It's like we're incapable of normal human interaction.”

“Changing the big picture takes time.. and the best things to do is focus on the things that we can make in our lives if we're doing all that. That becomes the collage of real change”

“Every human interaction offers you the chance to make things better or to make things worse.”

“We start off with high hopes, then we bottle it. We realise that we’re all going to die, without really finding out the big answers. We develop all those long-winded ideas which just interpret the reality of our lives in different ways, without really extending our body of worthwhile knowledge, about the big things, the real things. Basically, we live a short disappointing life; and then we die. We fill up our lives with shite, things like careers and relationships to delude ourselves that it isn’t all totally pointless.”

“But you're wrong if you think that the joy of life comes principally from human relationships. God's placed it all around us. It's in every thing. In anything we can experience. people just need to change the way they look at those things.”