Most of life on Earth has a deep past, much deeper than…

Nothing in our evolutionary history specifically prepared us to live in large societies. Almost everything about the way culture works does.

— Mark Pagel

“In the course of life, all such systems (i.e., the different evolutionary ridges) are somewhat functionally interdependent, as are components within each system (i.e.,…

— Scott Atran

In terms of evolutionary history, it was only yesterday that men learned to walk around on two legs and get in trouble thinking complicated…

— Haruki Murakami

“Art invites us to become explorers and excavators of our vast internal landscapes, discovering new terrain and digging deep into the past to unearth…

— Jaeda DeWalt

“In Wright Morris's novel Plains Song, the narrator asks, "Is the past a story we are persuaded to believe, in the teeth of the…

— Elliott West

I'm trying to get to a deep future, but in order to get to a deep future, I had to think about the deep…

— Mary Daly

Adrienne Mayor's inquiry into the myth--and surprising reality--of Amazon women begins with the fierce Greek huntress Atalanta, but takes us deep into the past…

— Steven Saylor

With impeccable timing and a fine instinct for the telling detail, Francesca Abbate evokes the plenitudes and the deprivations of human habitation, the nurturing…

— Linda Gregerson

I wrote poetry in middle school and high school and even through college. It was bad. I just don't think I'm very good at…

— Jesmyn Ward

This is an age of intellectual sauces, of essence, of distillation. We have conclusions without deductions, abridgments of history and abridgments of science without…

— Benjamin Haydon

History is the distillation of rumour.

— Thomas Carlyle

To a writer, madness is a final distillation of self, a final editing down. It's the drowning out of false voices.

— Don DeLillo

Poetry is an act of distillation. It takes contingency samples, is selective. It telescopes time. It focuses what most often floods past us in…

— Diane Ackerman

And to use something as elegant as a tree? Imagine this design assignment: Design something that makes oxygen, sequesters carbon, fixes nitrogen, distills water,…

— William McDonough

I have wished to see chemistry applied to domestic objects, to malting, for instance, brewing, making cider, to fermentation and distillation generally, to the…

— Thomas Jefferson