“Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born—a hundred million years—and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together. There was a peace, a serenity, an absence of all sense of responsibility, an absence of worry, an absence of care, grief, perplexity; and the presence of a deep content and unbroken satisfaction in that hundred million years of holiday which I look back upon with a tender longing and with a grateful desire to resume, when the opportunity comes.”

Source: The Creation of the Universe (1952), p. 139

Source: Cosmos (1980), p. 73

Source: Hoffa The Real Story (1975), Chapter 1, I'll Be Back, p. 13

The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God (2006)
Context: The amount of organic matter that could have been produced in the first few hundred million years of Earth history was sufficient to have produced in the present ocean a several-percent solution of organic matter. This is just about the dilution of Knorr's chicken soup, and not that different from the composition either. And chicken soup is widely known to be good for life.

Source: What On Earth Is About To Happen… For Heaven’s Sake? (2013), p. 51

Don Lattin, The Harvard Psychedelic Club (2010), p. 202

Source: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

Source: The Paris Review interview (1981), p. 322

God Is An Iron (1977)
Context: "It took a couple of hundred million years to develop a thinking ape and you want a smart one in a lousy few hundred thousand? That lemming drive you're talking about is there — but there's another kind of drive, another kind of force that's working against it. Or else there wouldn't still be any people and there wouldn't be the words to have this conversation and—" She paused, looked down at herself. "And I wouldn't be here to say them."