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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| aae38c3 | I suppose there's no way of putting the mushroom cloud back into that nice, shiny uranium sphere. | Isaac Asimov | ||
| 4a7c281 | To him, a stilted geometric love of arrangement was "system," and indefatigable and feverish interest in the pettiest facets of day-to-day bureaucracy was "industry", indecision when right was "caution", and blind stubbornness when wrong, "determination." | petty | Isaac Asimov | |
| 66845fc | Lamentarsi e una caratteristica innata della specie umana. Nel Secolo del Carbone la gente imprecava contro la macchina a vapore; in una commedia di Shakespeare un personaggio lamenta l'invenzione della polvere da sparo. Mille anni dopo ci si lamentava per la fabbricazione del cervello positronico. | Isaac Asimov | ||
| 92658ae | Who?" "Schiller. A German dramatist of three centuries ago. In a play about Joan of Arc, he said, 'Against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain.' I'm no god and I'll contend no longer. Let it go, Pete, and go your way. Maybe the world will last our time and, if not, there's nothing that can be done anyway. I'm sorry, Pete. You fought the good fight, but you lost, and I'm through." | Isaac Asimov | ||
| e7626f0 | He was conscious only of the mightiest deed of man; the complete and almost contemptuously final conquest of a world. | Isaac Asimov | ||
| 4927f2d | It is always useful, you see, to subject the past life of reform politicians to rather inquisitive research. | Isaac Asimov | ||
| 81f7602 | There's something really liberating about having some corner of your life that's yours, that no one gets to see except you. It's a little like nudity or taking a dump. Everyone gets naked every once in a while. Everyone has to squat on the toilet. There's nothing shameful, deviant or weird about either of them. | Cory Doctorow | ||
| c3c9f49 | I'd never been a tall guy, and the girls I'd dated had all been my height--teenaged girls grow faster than guys, which is a cruel trick of nature. | Cory Doctorow | ||
| 16007ac | I used to want to understand how the world worked. Little things, like heavy stuff goes at the bottom of the laundry bag, or big things, like the best way to get a boy to chase you is to ignore him, or medium things, like if you cut an onion under running water your eyes won't sting, and if you wash your fingers afterwards with lemon-juice they won't stink. I used to want to know all the secrets, and every time I learned one, I felt like I'.. | secrets | Cory Doctorow | |
| d1872bc | The United States of America was a pirate nation for the first one hundred years of its existence, ripping off the patents and trademarks of the imperial European powers it had liberated itself from by blood. By keeping their GDP at home, the U.S. revolutionaries were able to bootstrap their nation into an industrial powerhouse. Now, it seems, their descendants are bent on ensuring that no other country can pull the same trick off. | history | Cory Doctorow | |
| 2c40695 | Captain Nemo pointed to this prodigious heap of shellfish, and I saw that these mines were genuinely inexhaustible, since nature's creative powers are greater than man's destructive instincts. | Jules Verne | ||
| 2b9b027 | It is certain," exclaimed my uncle in a tone of triumph. "But silence, do you hear me? silence upon the whole subject; and let no one get before us in this design of discovering the centre of the earth." | Jules Verne | ||
| f1936f5 | Mr. Fogg played, not to win, but for the sake of playing. | Jules Verne | ||
| 0c55f24 | A scholar has to know a little of everything. | Jules Verne | ||
| a699bf6 | Solitude, isolation, are painful things, and beyond human endurance. | Jules Verne | ||
| 6c2ca1a | She became confused when she stepped onto an escalator that wasn't working. | Don DeLillo | ||
| 0862df4 | The grasp of objects that bind us to some betokening. | Don DeLillo | ||
| 0b5aeb3 | We can't get outside the aura. We're part of the aura. We're here, we're now. | Don DeLillo | ||
| ba5f7b6 | holes are interesting. there are books about holes. | don-delillo | Don DeLillo | |
| a414ea2 | Time is a corporate asset now. It belongs to the free market system. The present is harder to find. It is being sucked out of the world to make way for the future of uncontrolled markets and huge investment potential. The future becomes insistent. "This is why something will happen soon, maybe today...to correct the acceleration of time. Bring nature back to normal, more or less." -- | Don DeLillo | ||
| f04c05e | Now this girl was about twenty-one years old. A sweet little coed. Spends a night with a married man. Goes home the next day and tells her mama and daddy. Don't ask me why. Maybe just to rub their faces in it. They decide she needs a lesson. Whole family drives out into the desert, right out to that spot we just passed. All three of them plus the girl's pet dog. Papa tells the girl to dig a shallow grave. Mama gets down on her hands and kne.. | Don DeLillo | ||
| 877c477 | It was agreeable to her, the smell of tobacco. It was part of her knowledge of his body. It was the aura of the man, a residue of smoke and unbroken habit, a dimension in the night, and she lapped it off the curled gray hairs on his chest and tasted it in his mouth. It was who he was in the dark, cigarettes and mumbled sleep and a hundred other things nameable and not. | Don DeLillo | ||
| 27f701d | Remember literature, Charlie? It involved getting drunk and getting laid. | Don DeLillo | ||
| 8d3985b | Those blanked-out eternities at the airport. Getting there, waiting there, standing shoeless in long lines. Think about it. We take off our shoes and remove our metal objects and then enter a stall and raise our arms and get body-scanned and sprayed with radiation and reduced to nakedness on a screen somewhere and then how totally helpless we are all over again as we wait on the tarmac, belted in, our plane eighteenth in line, and it's all .. | Don DeLillo | ||
| 078cd8c | Cities were built to measure time, to remove time from nature. There's an endless counting down, he said. When you strip away all the surfaces, when you see into it, what's left is terror. This is the thing that literature was meant to cure. | delillo literature terror | Don DeLillo | |
| a57a40c | Air travel reminds us who we are. It's the means by which we recognize ourselves as modern. The process removes us from the world and sets us apart from each other. We wander in the ambient noise, checking one more time for the flight coupon, the boarding pass, the visa. The process convinces us that at any moment we may have to submit to the force that is implied in all this, the unknown authority behind it, behind the categories, the lang.. | tourists travel | Don DeLillo | |
| f23eb90 | She was a voice with a body as afterthought, a wry smile that sailed through heavy traffic. Give her a history and she'd disappear. Eric Packer about Vija Kinski | voice | Don DeLillo | |
| 33cdaaa | War is the form nostalgia takes when men are hard-pressed to say something good about their country. | Don DeLillo | ||
| 8824f77 | What's the point of living if we don't die at the end of it? | Don DeLillo | ||
| 7597343 | The family is the cradle of the world's misinformation. | fact family information knowledge | Don DeLillo | |
| 3fb08a4 | People will not die. Isn't this the creed of the new culture? People will be absorbed in streams of information. I know nothing about this. Computers will die. They're dying in their present form. They're just about dead as distinct units. | Don DeLillo | ||
| e8543c6 | Maybe what has to happen is that the individual must allow himself to be swept along, must find himself in the stream of no-choice, the single direction. This is what makes things inevitable. You use the restrictions and penalties they invent to make yourself stronger. History means to merge. The purpose of history is to climb out of your own skin. (101) | Don DeLillo | ||
| 91720e6 | What is a nebulous mass, just out of idle curiosity?" "A possible growth in the body." "And it's called nebulous because you can't get a clear picture of it." "We get very clear pictures. The imaging block takes the clearest pictures humanly possible. It's called a nebulous mass because it has no definite shape, form, or limits." "What can it do in terms of worst-case scenario contingencies?" "Cause a person to die." "Speak English, for Go.. | Don DeLillo | ||
| 24ca716 | Something about the time of year depressed him deeply. Overcast skies and cutting wind, leaves falling, dusk falling, dark too soon, night flying down before you are ready. It's a terror. It's a bareness of the soul. He hears the rustle of nuns. Here comes winter in the bone. We've set it loose on the land. There must be some song or poem, some folk magic we can use to ease this fear. Skelly Bone Pete. Here it is in the landscape and sky. W.. | don-delillo libra skelly-bone-pete | Don DeLillo | |
| 66d15bc | You could put your faith in technology. It got you here, it can get you out. This is the whole point of technology. It creates an appetite for immortality on the one hand. It threatens universal existence on the other. Technology is lust removed from nature. | murray | Don DeLillo | |
| 45100da | But precisely because history is not foreordained, we mere mortals must invent it as we go along--and in circumstances, as old Marx rightly pointed out, not entirely of our own making. We shall have to ask the perennial questions again, but be open to different answers. | Tony Judt | ||
| 9b3434e | Whatever Americans fondly believe, their government has always had its fingers in the economic pie. What distinguishes the USA from every other developed country has been the widespread belief to the contrary. | Tony Judt | ||
| 50b74ab | How terribly unfair that his whole self aches because of the shape of a shoulder, the soft line of a hip. | Nathan Englander | ||
| 3cb7f75 | To go back is nothing but death; to go forward is fear of death, and life everlasting beyond it. I will yet go forward. | John Bunyan | ||
| 46c5326 | Great sins do draw out great grace; and where guilt is most terrible and fierce, there the mercy of God in Christ, when showed to the soul, appears most high and mighty... | John Bunyan | ||
| 6f3762e | Christian may have entered the Valley of Humiliation overconfident and puffed up with false pride, but he departs with humble reliance on the Word of God and prayerful gratitude to the Lord of the Highway who has come to his aid and saved him from the Destroyer. He goes forward with his sword drawn. He has learned his lesson and now relies consciously on God's Word for protection. 5. | John Bunyan | ||
| 06337cd | Alright, go away. I have a tiny world to save. | humor video-games | Bryan Lee O'Malley | |
| d6f1951 | These shoes are Mr Silly's shoes, Scott. | mr-men | Bryan Lee O'Malley | |
| e2790e1 | Let's be friends based on mutual hate." - Wallace Wells "Listen to this, okay? Just listen. You hear that? That's' market bacon hitting the pan. Today a child is born unto us, and his name will be bacon." - Wallace Wells" | Bryan Lee O'Malley |