The aim of science is to discover and illuminate truth. And that, I take it, is the aim of literature, whether biography or history or fiction. It seems to me, then, that there can be no separate literature of science.

Acceptance speech of the National Book Award for Nonfiction (1952) for The Sea Around Us; also in Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson (1999) edited by Linda Lear, p. 91