No one escapes from life alive. - Michael Crichton

He finally decided that children liked dinosaurs because these giant creatures personified the uncontrollable force of looming authority. They were symbolic parents.

The trouble with this country,” he said, “is that the women have no guts.They’d rather slink off and have a dangerous, illegal operation performed than change the laws. The legislators are all men, and men don’t bear babies; they can afford to be moralistic.

Plants evolve like every other form of life, and they’ve come up with their own forms of aggression, defense, and so on. In the nineteenth century, most theories concerned animals — nature red in tooth and claw, all that. But now scientists are thinking about nature green in root and stem. We realize that plants, in their ceaseless struggle to survive, have evolved everything from complex symbiosis with other animals, to signaling mechanisms to warn other plants, to outright chemical warfare.