For a moment he was so confused that he actually thought he had never in all his life seen anything so beautiful as this girl—although he only caught her from behind in silhouette against the candlelight. He meant, of course, he had never smelled anything so beautiful. But since he knew the smell of humans, knew it a thousandfold, men, women, children, he could not conceive of how such an exquisite scent could be emitted by a human being. Normally human odor was nothing special, or it was ghastly. Children smelled insipid, men urinous, all sour sweat and cheese, women smelled of rancid fat and rotting fish. Totally uninteresting, repulsive—that was how humans smelled…And so it happened that for the first time in his life, Grenouille did not trust his nose and had to call on his eyes for asistance if he was to believe what he smelled. This confusion of senses did not last long at all. Actually he required only a moment to convince himself optically—then to abandon himself all the more ruthlessly to olfactory perception. And now he smelled that this was a human being, smelled the sweat of her ampits, the oil in her hair, the fishy odor of her genitals, and smelled it all with the greatest pleasure. Her sweat smelled as fresh as the sea breeze, the tallow of her hair as sweet as nut oil, her genitals were as fragrant as the bouquet of water lilies, her skin as apricot blossoms…and the harmony of all these components yielded a perfume so rich, so balanced, so magical, that every perfume that Grenouille had smelled until now, every edifice of odors that he had so playfully created within himself, seemed at once to be utterly meaningless. A hundred thousand odors seemed worthless in the presence of this scent. This one scent was the higher principle, the pattern by which the others must be ordered. It was pure beauty.

The beauty of flames lies in their strange play, beyond all proportion and harmony. Their diaphanous flare symbolizes at once grace and tragedy, innocence and despair, sadness and voluptuousness. The burning transcendence has something of the lightness of great purifications. I wish the fiery transcendence would carry me up and throw me into a sea of flames, where, consumed by their delicate and insidious tongues, I would die an ecstatic death. The beauty of flames creates the illusion of a pure, sublime death similar to the light of dawn. Immaterial, death in flames is like a burning of light, graceful wings. Do only butterflies die in flames? What about those devoured by the flames within them?

The Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdos used to describe himself as a “machine for turning coffee into theorems”. In much the same way, genes are machines for turning stars into a bird's compass; carotenoids into males of dazzling beauty; smells into love-potions; facial muscles into signals of friendship; a glance into uncertainty of paternity; and oxygen, water, light, zinc, calcium and iron into bears, beetles, bacteria or bluebells. More strictly, genes are machines for turning stars into birds and thereby into more genes.

Frank Oppenheimer: “I think he [J. Robert Oppenheimer] and I were lying down right next to each other flat on the desert right outside the control [room] at the time the bomb went off.”

Robert Wilson: “When it went off … we saw what was just a tremendously overpowering vision of this thing happening. Seeing the mountain small beside it. Seeing… some kind of beauty, but awesome … as it slowly developed, went up in the air, and made the whole desert light up as if at noon. A large desert rimmed by mountains appeared to be a small place. And that was something that, once that had happened, I was a different person from then on.”

Frank Oppenheimer: “At the time it went off I think absolutely — I knew sort of what would happen but I didn't expect the heat from the flash at five miles away to be nearly that intense. And then there was a cloud, the radioactive cloud sort of hovered there.

[…]

So there was this sense of this ominous cloud hanging over us. It was so brilliant purple, with all the radioactivity glowing. And it just seemed to hang there forever.

Of course it didn't. It must have been just a very short time until it went up.

It was very terrifying.

And the thunder from the blast bounced on the rocks and then went — I don't know where it bounced, but it never seemed to stop, not like an ordinary echo with thunder. It just kept echoing back and forth and then — it was a very scary time when it went off.

I wish I could remember what my brother said, but I can't. But I think we just said, 'It worked.' I think that's what we said, both of us.

And nobody knew it was going to work.”

Life is a sexually transmitted disease.

The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures.

Sometimes there's so much beauty in the world, I feel I can't take it. Sometimes I feel like I'm seeing it all at once, and it's too much, my heart fills up like a balloon that's about to burst.

Why not, also, other trees with immense, splendid flowers, perfuming whole regions? Why not other elements beside fire, air, earth, and water? There are four, only four, nursing fathers of various beings! What a pity! Why should not there be forty, four hundred, four thousand! How poor everything is, how mean and wretched—grudgingly given, poorly invented, clumsily made! Ah! the elephant and the hippopotamus, what power! And the camel, what suppleness!

But the butterfly, you will say, a flying flower! I dream of one that should be as large as a hundred worlds, with wings whose shape, beauty, colors, and motion I cannot even express. But I see it—it flutters from star to star, refreshing them and perfuming them with the light and harmonious breath of its flight! And the people up there gaze at it as it passes in an ecstasy of delight!

At last I looked at her; I took her elbows and looked down into her face, her dear face. Liza is one of those women who is the envy and despair of all the other women her age; she always, always would look younger than she was and younger than all of them. It wasn't only the small, slender, firm body and the smooth skin and clear eyes; it was the way she carried herself, the way, when she moved or spoke, she released energy rather than stoking it up and eking it out like the rest of us. She kept her masses of blue-fired black hair rolled and folded up into a gleaming dark helmet and her eyes were not green, as they seemed to be, but an illuminated blue full of so many flecks of gold that they seemed to be green.

“And now at last it comes. You will give me the Ring freely! In place of the Dark Lord you will set up a Queen. And I shall not be dark, but beautiful and terrible as the Morning and the Night! Fair as the Sea and the Sun and the Snow upon the Mountain! Dreadful as the Storm and the Lightning! Stronger than the foundations of the earth. All shall love me and despair!”

She lifted up her hand and from the ring that she wore there issued a great light that illuminated her alone and left all else dark. She stood before Frodo seeming now tall beyond measurement, and beautiful beyond enduring, terrible and worshipful. Then she let her hand fall, and the light faded, and suddenly she laughed again, and lo! she was shrunken: a slender elf-woman, clad in simple white, whose gentle voice was soft and sad.

Participating in the most radical synchronous chatgroups must be like playing in an enormous, never-ending, crazy game, or attending a perpetual linguistic party, where you bring your language, not a bottle.

About a decade ago, at the request of Psychology Today magazine, I had an amusing debate with Richard Dawkins about testicles. Dawkins had famously proposed the metaphor of the “selfish gene” to explain how traits in organisms can be understood from the imagined point of view of a gene wishing to propagate itself. The underlying logic of the metaphor is compelling, yet it doesn't always seem to work gracefully—as in the case of human male genitalia.

The site of human testicles seems a bizarre anomaly from an evolutionary point of view, like positioning the driver of an armored vehicle in a sack strapped to the bumper. If the whole point of the human organism is to pass on genes, why put the repository of those precious genes out front, in harm's way?