DNA does not fade; it does not rust; it is not eroded by wind nor reduced to ruin by fire; it is the traveler from an antique land that lives within us all. Research programs analyzing mitochondrial DNA sequences from all corners of the globe have discovered thirty-three clans that converge until there is only one ancestor, the mother of all the maternal ancestries of every one of the six billion people in the world. We are all her direct descendants.

— Bryan Sykes, The Seven Daughters of Eve, 2001

Everything lingers but a moment, and hastens on to death. The plant and the insect die at the end of summer, the brute and the man after a few years; death reaps unweariedly. Yet nothwithstanding thousands of years of death and decay, nothing has been lost, not an atom of the matter, still less anything of the inner being, that exhibits itself as nature. In spite of time, death, and decay, we are still all together.

— Arthur Schopenhauer <-> Philip K. Dick <-> Elaine Reichek