Nye Quotes

Everyone you will ever meet knows something you don't.

I love the solitude of reading. I love the deep dive into someone else's story, the delicious ache of a last page.

The more you find out about the world, the more opportunities there are to laugh at it.

I felt a bit silly giving this advice to a girl who regularly fought monsters with golden swords, but I had promised Bill Nye the Science Guy I would always promote safe laboratory practices.

I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous, or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular, but because it never forgot what it could do.

The person you have known a long tme is embedded in you like a jewel. The person you have just met casts out a few glistening beams & you are fascinated to see more of them. How many more are there? With someone you've barely met the curiosity is intoxicating.

Being good felt like a heavy coat, so I took it off.

It is really hard to be lonely very long in a world of words. Even if you don't have friends somewhere, you still have language, and it will find you and wrap its little syllables around you and suddenly there will be a story to live in.

Kindness Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth. What you held in your hand, what you counted and carefully saved, all this must go so you know how desolate the landscape can be between the regions of kindness. How you ride and ride thinking the bus will never stop, the passengers eating maize and chicken will stare out the window forever. Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness, you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho lies dead by the side of the road. You must see how this could be you, how he too was someone who journeyed through the night with plans and the simple breath that kept him alive. Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. You must wake up with sorrow. You must speak to it till your voice catches the thread of all sorrows and you see the size of the cloth. Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore, only kindness that ties your shoes and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread, only kindness that raises its head from the crowd of the world to say It is I you have been looking for, and then goes with you everywhere like a shadow or a friend.

Because sometimes I live in a hurricane of words and not one of them can save me.

To leave the world better than you found it, sometimes you have to pick up other people’s trash.

I Still Have Everything You Gave Me It is dusty on the edges. It is slightly rotten. I guard it without thinking. I focus on it once a year when I shake it out in the wind. I do not ache. I would not trade.

Wagner’s music is better than it sounds.

Hard to find anything lovelier than a tree. They grow at right angles to a tangent of the nominal sphere of the Earth.

I am looking for the human who admits his flaws Who shocks the adversary By being kinder not stronger What would that be like? We don't even know

Getting over what you did to me is not why I get out of bed anymore.

Where we live in the world is never one place. Our hearts, those dogged mirrors, keep flashing us moons before we are ready for them.

you will never catch up. Walk around feeling like a leaf know you could tumble at any second. Then decide what to do with your time. --The Art of Disappearing

Anyone who says, “Here’s my address, write me a poem,” deserves something in reply. So I’ll tell a secret instead: poems hide. In the bottoms of our shoes, they are sleeping. They are the shadows drifting across our ceilings the moment before we wake up. What we have to do is live in a way that lets us find them.

Amy: Pond and her boys . . . my poncho boys. If we're going to die, let's die looking like a peruvian folk band.

Humor is everywhere, in that there's irony in just about anything a human does.

Clarabelle...Clarabelle... You worked as Kenspeckle Grouse's assistant, did you not?' 'One of the. He fired all the others.' 'But not you?' 'He fired me on the second day, but I kept coming in. I had nowhere else to go.' 'And then you killed him.' 'Yes.' 'A Remnant squirmed inside you, and you killed Kenspeckle Grouse.' 'Yes.' Nye grinned. 'You're hired. But I have warn you, if you try to kill me, I will dissect you and sing along to your screams.' 'Can I have Mondays off?' 'You may.

Let me peer out at the world through your lens. (Maybe I'll shudder, or gasp, or tilt my head in a question.) Let me see how your blue is my turquoise and my orange is your gold. Suddenly binary stars, we have startling gravity. Let's compare scintillation - let's share starlight.

The moon is out all day. I don't want to shock you.

Science is the key to our future, and if you don’t believe in science, then you’re holding everybody back. And it’s fine if you as an adult want to run around pretending or claiming that you don’t believe in evolution, but if we educate a generation of people who don’t believe in science, that’s a recipe for disaster. We talk about the Internet. That comes from science. Weather forecasting. That comes from science. The main idea in all of biology is evolution. To not teach it to our young people is wrong.

I promise not to hurt you, unless you try to take my shit. Then I'll twist your head off and hide it in a bush somewhere.

It ain’t how hard you are when you’re standing over top of someone that really matters. It’s how hard you are when someone’s standing over top of you that shows what you’re made of.

The Rider A boy told me if he roller-skated fast enough his loneliness couldn't catch up to him, the best reason I ever heard for trying to be a champion. What I wonder tonight pedaling hard down King William Street is if it translates to bicycles. A victory! To leave your loneliness panting behind you on some street corner while you float free into a cloud of sudden azaleas, pink petals that have never felt loneliness, no matter how slowly they fell.

It was terrible when a single conversation with someone determined your whole future relationship.

The natural world is a package deal; you don’t get to select which facts you like and which you don’t.

Poetry [is] more necessary than ever as a fire to light our tongues.

Mystery: Everything felt better before you got there than when you actually got there. When you actually got there, you didn't quite have the energy to be there.

Everyone that you'll ever met wil know someone that you won't

Maybe if we re-invent whatever our lives give us we find poems.

Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth.

America had many other discoverers besides Columbus, but he seems to have made more satisfactory arrangements with the historians than any of the others.

What happens to other species also happens to us.

We start out as little bits of disconnected dust.

The Earth is not 6,000 or 10,000 years old. It's not. And if that conflicts with your beliefs, I strongly feel you should question your beliefs.

If someday, in a morning, you see you, in a mirror or the dent of a spoon, and wonder Where is my soul and Where has it gone, remember this: Catch the gaze of a woman on the metro, subway, tram. Look at a man. Seek and you will find you in the silvered space, a flash between souls.

I'm writing mostly to thank you for living you eighty years and to tell you I love you and think of you often.

The world is neither unipolar, multipolar, nor chaotic—it is all three at the same time.

No other organism on Earth does that. Yes, yes, I understand that dolphins are very smart, but I don’t think they build libraries or even contemplate such a project.

only kindness that raises its head from the crowd of the world to say it is I you have been looking for, and then goes with you everywhere like a shadow or a friend.

Today you will say things you can predict and other things you could never imagine this minute. Don't reject them, let them come through when they're ready, don't think you can plan it al out. This day will never, no matter how long you live, happen again. It is exquisitely singular. It will never again be exactly repeated.

I want to be someone making music/with my coming.

What is soft power? It is the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion or payments. It arises from the attractiveness of a country’s culture, political ideals, and policies.

When it's my time, and the reaper calls my name, there will be no stink of fear on me, and my only wish will be to die with grace, covered in the blood of my enemies.

Later our dreams begin catching fire around the edges, they burn like paper, we wake with our hands full of ash.

Maybe when your mother died young, you became instantly old.

My mother used to tell me when I went somewhere, "Please leave your foolishness at home." But how could I do that? It was stuck on me.

Skin color is basically a measure of the local ultraviolet levels, and it is controlled by relatively minor adaptive changes in the genome.

The nurse snorted, and said. “All men are pigs.” “Not all men.” Jango said. “Some of the men are zombies.

What would it be like to be a turtle inside a shell hit by hailstones?

Most days weren't clear when you were in them.

Poetry calls us to pause. There is so much we overlook, while the abundance around us continues to shimmer, on its own.

Ah...Dectective, this is a very private and personal moment for them both. I'm sure you can understand their need for-" A man stumbled out clutching a sheet round his waist and Valkyrie's eyes widened. "Whoa," she said as he hummed into a table. He was tall and sandy-haired and his physique was jaw-dropping lay amazing. "No way," she said. "Scapegrace?" The man looked at her, and shook his head. The a woman came charging out of the back room, slammed into the man and they both went rolling across the floor. "Give it to me!" The woman screamed. "Give it to me!" Nye scuttled over. "Mr Scapegrace, you know the procedure cannot be repeated, your brains are in far too deteriorated a condition." "You! Gave! Me! The! Wrong! Body!

I'm like the weather, never really can predict when this rain cloud's gonna burst; when it's the high or it's the low, when you might need a light jacket. Sometimes I'm the slush that sticks to the bottom of your work pants, but I can easily be the melting snowflakes clinging to your long lashes. I know that some people like: sunny and seventy-five, sunny and seventy-five, sunny and seventy-five, but you take me as I am and never forget to pack an umbrella.

We dropped our troubles into the lap of the storyteller, and they turned into someone else's.

But I should not have to explain to you how important it is for science and simplicity to coexist. One must not fear to be a little child again, when times of wonder are at hand.

How did we let an ideological resistance to inquiry become such a prominent part of our society?

maybe we try too hard to be remembered, waking to the glowing yellow disc in ignorance, swearing that today will be the day, today we will make something of our lives. what if we are so busy searching for worth that we miss the sapphire sky and cackling blackbird. what else is missing? maybe our steps are too straight and our paths too narrow and not overlapping. maybe when they overlap someone in another country lights a candle, a couple resolves their argument, a young man puts down his silver gun and walks away.

I’ll admit that the discovery of evolution is humbling, but it is also empowering. It transforms our relationship to the life around us. Instead of being outsiders watching the natural world go by, we are insiders. We are part of the process; we are the exquisite result of billions of years of natural research and development.

We are killing off species at the rate of about one per day. It is estimated that humans are driving species to extinction at least a thousand times faster than the otherwise natural rate.

We are all one race. The only difference is the color of our skin, and that comes from how close your ancestors lived to the Equator or at high altitudes like Tibetans. There have always been tribes, but what we have to appreciate now is that we live in a global community. And tribal loyalties…they’re not relevant to our future.

Sometimes you have to do something ugly so that something beautiful can grow.

When she had died, his anchor was gone and the world had burned from his untethered insanity.

Every day is a poetry day.

I myself have had long discussions with my dog friends, and by that I mean my friends who are dogs.

so long as we each focus only on our individual decisions and their short-term consequences, we will act like renters, not owners of this Earth.

Skin had hope, that's what skin does. Heals over the scarred place, makes a road.

The days are nouns: touch them The hands are churches that worship the world

Making a Fist For the first time, on the road north of Tampico, I felt the life sliding out of me, a drum in the desert, harder and harder to hear. I was seven, I lay in the car watching palm trees swirl a sickening pattern past the glass. My stomach was a melon split wide inside my skin. "How do you know if you are going to die?" I begged my mother. We had been traveling for days. With strange confidence she answered, "When you can no longer make a fist." Years later I smile to think of that journey, the borders we must cross separately, stamped with our unanswerable woes. I who did not die, who am still living, still lying in the backseat behind all my questions, clenching and opening one small hand.

When they say Don't I know you? say no. When they invite you to the party remember what parties are like before answering. Someone telling you in a loud voice they once wrote a poem. Greasy sausage balls on a paper plate. Then reply. If they say we should get together. say why? It's not that you don't love them any more. You're trying to remember something too important to forget. Trees. The monastery bell at twilight. Tell them you have a new project. It will never be finished. When someone recognizes you in a grocery store nod briefly and become a cabbage. When someone you haven't seen in ten years appears at the door, don't start singing him all your new songs. You will never catch up. Walk around feeling like a leaf. Know you could tumble any second. Then decide what to do with your time.

Just a little climate change. Nothing to worry about.

More than five hundred people have flown in space and twelve people have walked on the moon, but only three humans in history have been to the bottom of the ocean.

If the argument is, “Well, that was all part of the plan,” then I have to ask: How can you take the lack of evidence of a plan as evidence of a plan? That makes no sense.

I support all people on earth who have bodies like and unlike my body

The old, endless, approachable and always answering Sorrow," says my father Lucifer. "For who calls on me never goes unanswered. Only prayers to God go without answers.

The thousands small birds of January in their smooth soaring cloud finding the trees.

Apparently people commonly died when their loved ones were out of the room. Bathroom break. Quick trip down to the cafeteria for a grilled cheese. It was easier to die if you didn't have family members to worry about at that exact moment. Easier for the one who was dying, maybe.

Sometimes a bus ride was all it took to feel better.

I think of a poem as being deeper than headline news.

We are all aware that evolution happens, because we all have parents.

Scientifically speaking, there is tribalism and group bias, but there cannot be any such thing as racism. We are all one.

I have slept so many times you might think I would really be awake by now

I once fed a dog-fight operator to the dogs he had abused for so long, and do you want to know something? It felt so good. It was justice, girl. The fucking law never gave a shit about a victim, but justice is all heart.

If you’re a creationist reading this, and you want to remark something like, “Well, that’s the way he did it,” I’ll tell you right back, that is just not reasonable, nor is it satisfactory. If we were playing on a team right now, I’d say, “Get your head in the game.

History is but the record of the public and official acts of human beings. It is our object, therefore, to humanize our history and deal with people past and present; people who ate and possibly drank; people who were born, flourished and died; not grave tragedians, posing perpetually for their photographs.

She pinched her nose against the stench as I squirted oil of vitriol around the door. Vaporous tendrils curled from the seams. "What is that stuff?" "Back in medieval times," I said, "we used oil of vitriol for its healing properties. No doubt that's why Commodus had some in his infirmary. Today we call it sulphuric acid." Meg flinched. "Isn't that dangerous?" "Very." "And you healed with it?" "It was the Middle Ages. We were crazy back then." I held up the second syringe, this one filled with water. "Meg, what I'm about to do - never, ever try this on your own." I felt a bit silly giving this advice to a girl who regularly fought monsters with golden swords, but I had promised Bill Nye the Science Guy I would always promote safe laboratory practices.

Put another way, I love all of you dog lovers, but I have to spoil your fun a little with a fundamental truth. There is, in an important evolutionary sense, no such thing as a specific breed of dog. If a Great Dane has sex with a dachshund, you get a dog. If a Standard Poodle has sex with a Jack Russell terrier, you get a dog. If a mutt has sex with a so-called purebred, you get a dog.

I do think that all of us think in poems. I think of a poem as being deeper than headline news. You know how they talk about breaking news all the time, that -- if too much breaking news, trying to absorb all the breaking news, you start feeling really broken. And you need something that takes you to a place that's a little more timeless, that kind of gives you a place to stand to look out at all these things. Otherwise, you just feel assaulted by all of the tragedy in the world.

For you who came so far; for you who held out, wearing a black scarf to signify grief; for you who believe true love can find you amidst this atlas of tears linking one town to its own memory of mortar, when it was still a dream to be built and people moved there, believing, and someone with sky and birds in his heart said this would be a good place for a park.

like our parents always told us not to like firefighters warn against we're playing games and making the rules up as we go we're matching warmth to warmth starting fires burning wishes into our skin we're hidden holding forbidden lights we're children whose fathers have never taught never touch but we're finding these new flames we smother at the sound of footsteps.

We can be a lot smarter and more capable than a lot of the technology doubters and climate deniers assume. The people who dismiss concerns about global warming seem to be the pessimists who would rather give up than own up to the problems we have all created. The people who worry most about what we are doing to the planet are the optimists who believe we also have the intelligence—we, as a species, working together—to come up with powerful solutions to the problems we’re working on that will change the world for the better. Which way of looking at the world is going to produce a Next Greatest Generation? Will it be the ones who give up, or the ones who get going?

You Have to Be Very Careful” You have to be careful telling things. Some ears are tunnels. Your words will go in and get lost in the dark. Some ears are flat pans like the miners used looking for gold. What you say will be washed out with the stones. You look for a long time till you find the right ears. Till then, there are birds and lamps to be spoken to, a patient cloth rubbing shine in circles, and the slow, gradually growing possibility that when you find such ears they already know.

A true Arab knows how to catch a fly in his hands,” my father would say. And he’d prove it, cupping the buzzer instantly while the host with the swatter stared. In the spring our palms peeled like snakes. True Arabs believed watermelon could heal fifty ways. I changed these to fit the occasion. Years before, a girl knocked, wanted to see the Arab. I said we didn’t have one. After that, my father told me who he was, “Shihab”—”shooting star”— a good name, borrowed from the sky. Once I said, “When we die, we give it back?” He said that’s what a true Arab would say.

Boy and Egg Every few minutes, he wants to march the trail of flattened rye grass back to the house of muttering hens. He too could make a bed in hay. Yesterday the egg so fresh it felt hot in his hand and he pressed it to his ear while the other children laughed and ran with a ball, leaving him, so little yet, too forgetful in games, ready to cry if the ball brushed him, riveted to the secret of birds caught up inside his fist, not ready to give it over to the refrigerator or the rest of the day.

Remembering your mistakes more acutely than any minor success. This was the worst. The things that kept you up at night. Tip a waiter that was too small. The words that didn't fit the moment. Words that didn't come till to late. You could kill yourself in increments, punishing your spirit day after day-regret. Guilt. Not the guilt of the little girl who woke in the night embarrassed God was mad at her because she had ticked balls under her shirt, pretending to have breasts. "I even felt sexy." That was sweet, and pure, no crime at all. But the crime of obsessive replay-get rid of it, get rid of it. Who could ever have known that hardest punishments would be the ones you gave yourself?

The takeaway message here, as Jablonski points out, is that there is no such thing as different races of humans. Any differences we traditionally associate with race are a product of our need for vitamin D and our relationship to the Sun. Just a few clusters of genes control skin color; the changes in skin color are recent; they’ve gone back and forth with migrations; they are not the same even among two groups with similarly dark skin; and they are tiny compared to the total human genome. So skin color and “race” are neither significant nor consistent defining traits. We all descended from the same African ancestors, with little genetic separation from each other. The different colors or tones of skin are the result of an evolutionary response to ultraviolet light in local environments. Everybody has brown skin tinted by the pigment melanin. Some people have light brown skin. Some people have dark brown skin. But we all are brown, brown, brown.