Quotes from Natalie Angier

I'm an Atheist. I don't believe in God, Gods, Godlets or any sort of higher power beyond the universe itself, which seems quite high and powerful enough to me.

I may not believe in life after death, but what a gift it is to be alive now.

Scientists have discovered that the small, brave act of cooperating with another person, of choosing trust over cynicism, generosity over selfishness, makes the brain light up with quiet joy.

We are made of stardust; why not take a few moments to look up at the family album?

When people talk of the indelibility of a strong memory, they speak of recalling exactly where they were when Kennedy was shot or the Challenger space shuttle exploded. But what a woman really remembers is her first period; now there's a memory seared into the brain with the blowtorch of high emotion.

After I die," my daughter said, "I hope some of my atoms can find their way into a cat.

Aggression and depression sound like two different, even polarized phenomena, but they're not. Depression is aggression turned inward, directed against the self, or the imagined, threatening self. A seriously depressed person may look anesthetized to an observer, but the depressed person is never anesthetized to herself. She may wish to be, and she may seek to be with chemical aid, but she cannot truly placate her sneering, jabbering, nested aggressor.

sexual access to the woman is formalized through a public ceremony

The ovaries know no bounds. They are the primary source of sex hormones that sexualize the body. Before the ovaries are able to serve up a viable egg, they are quite adept at dishing out the sex hormones. The sex hormones cause pubic hair to grow, fat to gather on the breasts and hips, the pelvis to widen, and eventually menstrual blood to flow.

that without the promise of great reward we'd be content to stay home and catch up on our flossing.

We are of the universe, and by studying the universe we ultimately turn the mirror on ourselves.

By growing a beard, a man turns his face into an echo of his crotch; and the capacity to grow a beard very likely predates the use of cosmetics by a few hundred thousand years.

You don't need to visit a foreign country or hike a desert canyon or go out on a cloudless, moonless night and get drunk on star champagne.

We are made of stardust; why not take a few moments to look up at the family album? "Most of the time, when people walk outside at night and see the stars, it's a big, pretty background, and it's not quite real," said the Caltech planetary scientist Michael Brown. "It doesn't occur to them that the pattern they see in the sky repeats itself once a year, or to appreciate why that's true.

estrogen is essential to the maturation and preservation of bones not only in women, as had been known, but also in men; that estrogen metabolism affects glucose metabolism and therefore the risk of diabetes; and that, contrary to dogma, estrogen is not essential to fetal survival. Fetal mice don't need it, and

estrogen is essential to the maturation and preservation of bones not only in women, as had been known, but also in men; that estrogen metabolism affects glucose metabolism and therefore the risk of diabetes; and that, contrary to dogma, estrogen is not essential to fetal survival. Fetal mice don't need it, and fetal humans don't need it.

A group of same-aged people is inherently unstable. Peers will compete just as siblings compete. The ancestral sorority was transgenerational, and if we want whatever strength and balm may come from sisterhood, it wouldn't hurt to recapitulate in some measure the timeworn model and brace our listing library of cohorts with bookends of the young and the seasoned.

A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people," the novelist and essayist Thomas Mann complained. "When I come home for lunch after writing all morning, my wife says I look like I just came home from a funeral," said Carl Hiaasen—and he writes comic novels.

Your opinion doesn't count. Your fond hopes and fantasies of Paradigms Found don't count. What counts is the quality and the quantity of the evidence.

The liver, for example, the largest gland in the body, performs more than five hundred tasks, including processing glucose, protein, fats, and other compounds the body needs, generating the hemoglobin that is the soul of a red blood cell, and detoxifying the poisons we consume when we drink wine or eat those fibrous packets of natural toxins called vegetables.

the empty-closet theory of the breast: if it's there, it will be stuffed.

They are, in fact, Cheaters, luring men into the foaming waters of carnality without even the vaguest possibility of conception. What a delight, what a subversion of expectation. The healthiest and most womanly of women are in fact a rendition of Amazon queens, self-possessed and self-defined, women whose bodies have an enviable integrity and a fleshy, nonreplicative beauty that razzes Charles Darwin. The buck, the stud, the bull, stops here.

In an effort to get fresh 'n' clean and to look like the dewy, virginal women pictured on the packages of Massengill, women can make themselves dirtier than ever. Douching kills off the beneficial lactobacilli and paves the way for infestation by anaerobes and their trails of cadaverine. So while I rarely dispense medical advice, this one is easy: don't douche, ever, period, end of squirt bottle.

Let's reject the notion that men have exclusive rights to the sun. Must Helios, Apollo, Ra, Mithras, and the other golden boys take up every seat in the solar chariot that lights each day and coaxes forth all life? This is a miscarriage of mythology, for a woman's egg resembles nothing so much as the sun at its most electrically alive: the perfect orb, speaking in tongues of fire.