“Maybe the natural world wasn't so jaw-droppingly horrible, appaling, nasty, vile. Sometimes nature could be quite sweet, really, as delicate as a confused and horny butterfly.”

“The Nature of men and women -their essential nature- is so vile and despicable that if you were to portray a person as he really is, no one would believe you.”

“Nature is not horrible. Nature is not wonderful. Nature is not cruel. Nature is not beautiful. Nature only is.”

“If the evolutionary mechanism of natural selection depends on death, destruction, and violence of the strong against the weak, then these things are perfectly natural. On what basis, then, does the atheist judge the natural world to be horribly wrong, unfair, and unjust?”

“And in that moment, the wordless thing passed between us, the thing that wasn't quite love but was so close I could believe in it sometimes.”

“In my world travels, I saw a good many varieties of butterflies. They’re incredibly delicate creatures, but they shouldn’t be underestimated. Observing them as I did, I learned a valuable lesson. Sometimes if you surround a butterfly too closely, it couldn’t fly if it wanted to.”