“For all species, including our own, the true figure of life is a perching bird, a passerine, alert and nervous in every part, ready to dart off in an instant. Life is always poised for flight. From a distance it looks still, silhouetted against the bright sky or the dark ground; but up close it is flitting this way and that, as if displaying to the world at every moment its perpetual readiness to take off in any of a thousand directions.”

—  Jonathan Weiner

Source: The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time (1994), Chapter 7, Twenty-Five Thousand Darwins

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Jonathan Weiner11
American nonfiction writer 1953

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