“Hey boys, come up here!" Lee's excited shout bounced from rock to rock down the gulch. "I've got all of California right here in this pan!”

“To date, treasure-hunters have followed up clue after clue, including a dagger-marked tree, to no avail. If there is a fortune buried in Handcart Gulch, it is still safely hidden”

“He was the standard against which all others were measured.”

“I am completely happy. My sister is here, and because my sister is here I am somehow more me.”

“…and I’m thinking how nothing is as simple as you guess-not right or wrong, not Judd Travers, not even me or this dog I got here. But the good part is I saved Shiloh and opened my eyes some. Now that ain’t bad for eleven.”

“It is too easy to think that ‘science’ is what happens now, that modernity and scientific thought are inseparable. Yet as Laura Snyder so brilliantly shows in this riveting picture of the first heroic age, the nineteenth century saw the invention of the computer, of electrical impulses, the harnessing of the power of steam – the birth of railways, statistics and technology. In ‘The Philosophical Breakfast Club’ she draws an endearing – almost domestic – picture of four scientific titans, and shows how – through their very ‘clubbability’ – they created the scientific basis on which the modern world stands.”

“We spend the first 12 months of our children's lives teaching them to walk and talk and the next 12 months teaching them to sit down and shut up.”