"You know, it might not be there anymore. It might be gone by now—exploded or something. Its light is still crossing space, just reaching our eyes now. But we don't see it as it is. We see it as it was... The immense distances to the stars and the galaxies mean that we see everything in space in the past—some as they were before the Earth came to be. Telescopes are time machines."

"Reality is blobby. It refuses to be systematized."

"It's attention (deciding what to pay attention to) that makes our reality."

"My only real interest in technology was how it could give us more access to physical reality."

"Today we call them plants, the Greek word for wanderers."

"As the body disappears, so does our ability to empathize."

"I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote."

"We do learn from the past, but we can't learn from disasters we can't even conceive of... We can't imagine all possible futures."

"I remember that not only is my mother an immigrant, but that there is something immigrant about the air I breathe, the water I drink, the carbon in my bones, and the thoughts in my mind."

"The explorer who will not come back or send back his ships to tell his tale is not an explorer, only an adventurer."

"The present grows out of the past."