EVOLUTION

Yet into this world of the machine  – this mechanical disturbance surrounded by desert silences – a ghost has come, a ghost whose step must have been as light and imperceptible as the first scurry of a mouse in Cheops’ tomb.  Musing over the Archean strata, one can hear and see it in the sub-cellars of the mind itself, a little green in a fulminating spring, some strange objects floundering and helpless in the ooze on the tide line, something beating, beating, like a heart until a mounting thunder goes up through the towering strata, until no drum that ever was can produce its rhythm, until no mind can contain it, until it rises, wet and seaweed-crowned, an apparition from marsh and tide pool, gross with matter, gurgling and inarticulate, ape and man-ape, grisly and fang-scarred, until the thunder is in oneself and is passing – to the ages beyond – to a world unknown, yet forever being born.

Loren Eiseley, The Firmament Of Time (Atheneum, 1967), 55-6.

This quote is by one of the finest science writers of the 20th century.  I’ve added hundreds of quotes to this site, writing I’ve collected over the years, in alphabetical order of topic.  Browse here.