Quotes from Loren Eiseley

I once saw, on a flower pot in my own living room, the efforts of a field mouse to build a remembered field. I have lived to see this episode repeated in a thousand guises, and since I have spent a large portion of my life in the shade of a nonexistent tree I think I am entitled to speak for the field mouse.

We are all potential fossils, still carrying within our bodies the crudites of former existences, the marks of a world in which living creatures flow with little more consistency than clouds from age to age. (As quoted by Richard Powers in The Echo Maker.

As for men, those myriad little detached ponds with their own swarming corpuscular life, what were they but a way that water has of going beyond the reach of rivers. (As quoted by Richard Powers in The Echo Maker)

The best way to be resurrected is to be forgotten.

Perhaps far outward on the rim of space a genuine star was similarly seized and flung... For a moment, we cast on an infinite beach together, beside an unknown hurler of suns... I have caught a glimpse of what man may be, along an endless wave beaten coast at dawn

It is conceivable that in principle man's motor through-ways resemble the slime trails along which are drawn the gathering mucors that erect the spore palaces, that man's cities are only the ephemeral moment of his spawning--that he must descend upon the orchard of far worlds or die.

just as instinct may fail an animal under some shift of environmental conditions, so man's cultural beliefs may prove inadequate to meet a new situation, or, on an individual level, the confused mind may substitute, by some terrible alchemy, cruelty for love. The

Science can be--and is--used by good men, but in its present sense it can scarcely be said to create them. Science, of course, in discovery represents the individual, but in the moment of triumph, science creates uniformity through which the mind of the individual once more flees away.... Man inhabits a realm half in and half out of nature, his mind reaching forever beyond the tool, the uniformity, the law, into some realm which is that of mind alone.

I one saw, on a flowerpot in my own living room, the efforts of a field mouse to rebuild a remembered field. I have lived to see this episode repeated in a thousand guises, and since i have spent a large portion of my life in the shade of a non-existent tree, i think i am entitled to speak for the field mouse. (As quoted by Richard Powers in The Echo Maker)

Like the herd animals we are, we sniff warily at the strange one among us.