Life is everywhere: slithering with the snake through nodding reeds, threading the parched desert with the kangaroo rat, swimming with the ameba in a drop of rain. Even if we project our musings beyond the world, life quickens the planets, binding them without a rope to moons, to suns, to the Pleiades.

The Seven Mysteries of Life: An Exploration of Science and Philosophy, Part Three, Chapter 14 (p. 407), Houghton Mifflin Company. 1978