Anthony Doerr Quotes

Biology is far from understanding exactly how a single cell develops into a baby, but research suggests that human development can ultimately be explained in terms of biochemistry and molecular biology. Most scientists would make a similar statement about evolution.

The process of the body changing and making a whole human fascinates me.

The vast majority of abortions are performed between the seventh and tenth week when the baby is already sucking his thumb, recoiling from pricking, responding to sound. All his organs are present, the brain is functioning, the heart is pumping, the liver is making blood cells, the kidneys are cleaning fluids, and there is a fingerprint. His genetic code is uniquely and unquestionably human. And, if we are willing, he can be seen by ultrasound.

In nature, if a cell gets too big, it divides. You can't come up with a set of rules that's going to work for 350 million people. You're just not.

The minute those two little particles inside a woman's womb have joined together, billions of decisions have been made. A thing like that has to come from entropy.

Upon the union of the male germ cell with the female egg cell, a new cell is created which almost immediately splits into two parts. One of these grows rapidly, creating the human body of the individual with all its organs, and dies only with the individual.

Life is the division of human cells, a process which begins at conception.

Now an embryo may seem like some scientific or laboratory term, but in fact the embryo contains the unique information that defines a person. All you add is food and climate control, and some time, and the embryo becomes you or me.

As a former fetus ....

The process of birth and the growth of human body into a complicated system are still a marvel for me.

Since the conventional belief about human embryology is that genes control the development of the fetus, the mother's role in her child's gestation is deemed to be not much more than providing nutrition, feeding her child.

No human being really begins on the day which appears in the passport as their date of birth. We all begin much much much earlier.

Empedolces claims that in utero, our backbone is one long solid; and that through the constriction of the womb and the punishments of birth it must be snapped again and again to form our vertebrae; that for the child to have a spine, his back must first be broken

What am I, Life? A thing of watery salt Held in cohesion by unresting cells, Which work they know not why, which never halt, Myself unwitting where their Master dwells?

Until man duplicates a blade of grass, nature can laugh at his so-called scientific knowledge. Remedies from chemicals will never stand in favor compared with the products of nature, the living cell of the plant, the final result of the rays of the sun, the mother of all life.

In science there is something known as a stem cell. A stem cell is an undifferentiated cell which has not yet decided whether it's gonna be a cell of your brain or a cell of your heart or of your finger nail. But science is learning how to coax, how to manipulate, the raw material of life that we call stem cell to become any cell of the body. I think that God is the stem cell of the universe.

Omnis cellula e cellula," he said again. "All cells come from cells. Every cell is born of a previous cell, which was born of a previous cell. Life comes from life. Life begets life begets life begets life begets life.

The only and absolute perfect union of two is when a baby hangs suspended in its mother's womb, like a tiny madman in a padded cell, attached to her, feeling her blood and hormones, and moods play through its body, feeling her feelings.

You cannot go into the womb to form the child; it is there and makes itself and comes forth whole-and there it is and you have made it and have felt it, but it has come itself.

We all begin life as parasites within the mother, and writers begin their existence imitatively, within the body of letters.

The dream of every cell is to become two cells.

In our own beginnings, we are formed out of the body's interior landscape. For a short while, our mothers' bodies are the boundaries and personal geography which are all that we know of the world...Once we no longer live beneath our mother's heart, it is the earth with which we form the same dependent relationship, relying...on its cycles and elements, helpless without its protective embrace.

The problem is that your daughter has given her heart to a 15-year-old boy, and a 15-year-old boy does not yet qualify as a human being.

Man is developed from an ovule, about 125th of an inch in diameter, which differs in no respect from the ovules of other animals.

We are nothing but the product of billions of years of molecules coming together and ratcheting up through natural selection, we are composed only of highways of fluids and chemicals sliding along roadways within billions of dancing cells, trillions of synaptic conversations hum in parallel, this vast egglike fabric of micron-thin circuitry runs algorithms undreamt of in modern science, and these neural programs give rise to our decision making, loves, desires, fears, and aspirations. That understanding would be a numinous experience, better than anything ever proposed in anyone's holy text.