“...what could be more vexing than to be feted on his birthday when he wants nothing so much as to retreat in solitude to ponder the approach of his own mortality?”

“Indeed such is Montagu’s enthusiasm, and so engaging is his undisguised admiration, that one is almost obligated to overlook the aside on page 311 where Montagu acknowledges indirectly that Tyson was almost entirely in error in all of his conclusions.”

“Throughout his twenty-eight years on the island, goats are as wild as it gets.”

“As so often happens when scientists quarrel, a lay audience is left to choose their preferred fairy tale”

“For better or worse, whether it is a sign of aesthetic complexity or of intellectual indecision, this novel [Frankenstein] offers equally fertile ground to those readers who like their meanings ambiguous and indeterminate and to those who prefer to discern a deeply important doctrine.”

“…Mellor’s statement is extremist in two directions: human civilization is in imminent peril, and only one solution will work. I doubt both these formulations, and almost every fiction I have encountered that depends upon them.”

“Wilderness appealed to those bored or disgusted with man and his works. It not only offered an escape from society but also was an ideal stage for the Romantic individual to exercise the cult that he frequently made of his own soul. The solitude and total freedom of the wilderness created a perfect setting for either melancholy or exultation.”