“One of the most remarkable of all ornithological discoveries was the realisation that birds in temperate regions undergo enormous seasonal changes in their internal organs...Perhaps the most far-reaching discovery relating to these changes was the finding in the 1970s that parts of the brain also varied in size across the year...The centres in the avian brain that control the acquisition and delivery of song in male birds shrink at the end of the breeding season and grow again in the following year.”

“To the freethinker, change is anticipated, and something to be embraced. To change our mind is our greatest strength, as it has led to the most remarkable discoveries in human insight and has resulted in the drive to grow as a species in all areas of our lives.”

“(In our city spring came from the sky, not from the soil, which was ruled by stone that recognizes no seasonal change. The change of the season could be glimpsed in the thinning of clouds, the appearance of the birds and the occasional rainbow.)”

“[I]t was [Barnett] Newman who made the famously wry remark, “Aesthetics is for the artist as ornithology is for the birds,”

“And so Discovery drove on toward Saturn, as often as not pulsating with the cool music of the harpsichord, the frozen thoughts of a brain that had been dust for twice a hundred years.”

“In the year 1752 it was announced that the second of September would be followed by the fourteenth. The matter was merely one of wording, of course; time in its substance was not to undergo any change.”