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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 9ab55c8 | At the sting in her eyes, she remembered for him that there must be no tears in his. | Eudora Welty | ||
| edd4ce1 | Homo sapiens is one of the few species on earth that care if they're seen having sex. The impala is unconcerned. The dingo roundly flaunts it. A masturbating chimpanzee will stare straight at you. To any creature other than you and I and 6 billion other privacy-needing H. sapiens, sex is like peeling a mango or scratching your ear. It's just something you do sometimes. | sex | Mary Roach | |
| 30bd304 | The slang for the rectum is "prison wallet"." | prison science | Mary Roach | |
| f80084c | In a wartime survey conducted by a team of food-habits researchers, only 14 percent of the students at a women's college said they liked evaporated milk. After serving it to the students sixteen times over the course of a month, the researchers asked again. Now 51 percent liked it. As Kurt Lewin put it, "People like what they eat, rather than eat what they like." | Mary Roach | ||
| cbb379d | No one is excluded from the astronaut corps based on penis size. | Mary Roach | ||
| 0f8e7a4 | How about suicide rate. And what a shame to lose them after they've made it back. We keep them alive, but we don't teach them how to live. | Mary Roach | ||
| ab92bf9 | Religion says that your soul goes to heaven or possibly to a seven-tiered garden, or that your soul is reincarnated into a new body, or that you lie around in your coffin clothes until the Second Coming. And, of course, only one of these can be true. Which means that for millions of people, religion will turn out to have been a bum steer as regards the hereafter. (13) | Mary Roach | ||
| 23a5d2d | Khoruts gave me a memorable example of how behavior can be covertly manipulated by microorganisms. The parasite Toxoplasma infects rats but needs to make its way into a cat's gut to reproduce. The parasite's strategy for achieving this goal is to alter the rat brain such that the rodent is now attracted to cat urine. Rat walks right up to cat, gets killed, eaten. If you saw the events unfold, Khoruts continued, you'd scratch your head and g.. | Mary Roach | ||
| 87f8653 | It would be especially comforting to believe that I have the answer to the question, What happens when we die? Does the light just go out and that's that--the million-year nap? Or will some part of my personality, my me-ness, persist? What will that feel like? What will I do all day? Is there a place to plug in my laptop? | death humor | Mary Roach | |
| 38cce08 | I agree with Dr. Makris. Does that mean I would let someone blow up my dead foot to help save the feet of NATO land mine clearers? It does. And would I let someone shoot my dead face with a nonlethal projectile to help prevent accidental fatalities? I suppose I would. What wouldn't I let someone do to my remains? I can think of only one experiment I know of that, were I a cadaver, I wouldn't want anything to do with. This particular experim.. | scientific-research | Mary Roach | |
| 41fa362 | Masters points out that the heterosexuals were at a disadvantage, as they do not benefit from what he called "gender empathy". Doing unto your partner as you would do unto yourself only works well when you're gay." | heterosexual homosexual sex sexuality | Mary Roach | |
| d5cd509 | It's possible that the reason I've never experienced a ghostly presence is that my temporal lobes aren't wired for it. It could well be that the main difference between skeptics (Susan Blackmore notwithstanding) and believers is the neural structure they were born with. But the question still remains: Are these people whose EMF-influenced brains alert them to "presences" picking up something real that the rest of us can't pick up, or are th.. | ghosts hallucinations science | Mary Roach | |
| 5da27d0 | But why do you want me? I mean, what am I? Ask yourself that." "I often have." | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| 1c7343c | INTERVIEWER Have you ever been envious of another writer? | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| 4f2e1f1 | But when I say 'cow', don't go running away with the idea of some decent, self-respecting cudster such as you may observe loading grass into itself in the nearest meadow. | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| 96e737e | I laughed derisively. "For goodness' sake, don't start gargling now. This is serious." "I was laughing." | P. G. Wodehouse | ||
| 003cde2 | I couldn't have made a better shot, if I had been one of those detectives who see a chap walking along the street and deduce that he is a retired manufacturer of poppet valves named Robinson with rheumatism in one arm, living at Clapham. | detectives | P.G. Wodehouse | |
| 991b2cb | You can't fling the hands up in a passionate gesture when you are driving a car at fifty miles an hour. Otherwise, I should have done so. | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| 0850485 | I'm much too much the popular pet ever since I sang 'Every Nice Girl Loves A Sailor' at the village concert last year. I had them rolling in the aisles. Three encores, and so many bows that I got a crick in the back." "Spare me the tale of your excesses," I said distantly. "I wore a sailor suit." "Please," I said, revolted." | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| 6bafdbe | Feminine psychology is admittedly odd, sir. The poet Pope..." "Never mind about the poet Pope, Jeeves." "No, sir." | bertie-wooster humor jeeves jeeves-and-wooster poets | P.G. Wodehouse | |
| 47b6f0b | The true philosopher is a man who says "All right," and goes to sleep in his armchair." | philosophy resignation | P.G. Wodehouse | |
| 77354ca | Would you say my head was like a pumpkin, Wooster?' 'Not a bit, old man.' 'Not like a pumpkin?' 'No, not like a pumpkin. A touch of the dome of St Paul's, perhaps. | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| 2270eeb | You see, the catch about portrait painting-- I've looked into the thing a bit-- is that you can't start painting portraits till people come along and ask you to, and they won't come and ask you to until you've painted a lot first. This makes it kind of difficult for a chappie. | life-lessons | P.G. Wodehouse | |
| fe15459 | Aunts Aren't Gentlemen | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| ef5a88a | He keeps looking at me so oddly." "Oddly? How? Give me an imitation." | courtship dyspepsia love | P.G. Wodehouse | |
| ac74487 | Good Lord, Jeeves! Is there anything you don't know?' 'I couldn't say, sir. | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| 44d164e | You must meet old Rowbotham, Bertie. A delightful chap. Wants to massacre the bourgeoisie, sack Park Lane and disembowel the hereditary aristocracy. Well, nothing could be fairer than that, what? | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| b1ad90b | He seemed to be doing his best to marry into a family of pronounced loonies, and how the deuce he thought he was going to support even a mentally afflicted wife on nothing a year beat me. Old Bittlesham was bound to knock off his allowance if he did anything of the sort and, with a fellow like young Bingo, if you knocked off his allowance, you might just as well hit him on the head with an axe and make a clean job of it. | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| 64037e9 | Well, the natives seemed fairly friendly, so I decided to stay the night." I made a mental note never to seem fairly friendly to an explorer. If you do, he always decides to stay the night." | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| 87e4e5b | More and more, it was beginning to be borne in upon me what a particularly difficult chap Gussie was to help. He seemed to so marked an extent to lack snap and finish. With infinite toil, you manoeuvred him into a position where all he had to do was charge ahead, and he didn't charge ahead, but went off sideways, missing the objective completely. | p-g-wodehouse right-ho-jeeves | P.G. Wodehouse | |
| 941167f | The Paddock was one of those medium-sized houses with a goodish bit of very tidy garden and a carefully rolled gravel drive curving past a shrubbery that looked as if it had just come back from the dry cleaner - the sort of house you take one look at and say to yourself, "Somebody's aunt lives there." | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| 70819ad | Stimulated by the juice, I believe, men have even been known to ride alligators. | love men | P.G. Wodehouse | |
| 9b8d62b | When you touch a man's nostalgia, he is yours. | Amy Tan | ||
| e4da726 | I taught her how American circumstances work. If you are born poor here, it's no lasting shame. You are first in line for a scholarship. If the roof crashes on your head, no need to cry over this bad luck. You can sue anybody, make the landlord fix it. You do not have to sit like a Buddha under a tree letting pigeons drop their dirty business on your head. You can buy an umbrella. Or go inside a Catholic church. In America, nobody says you .. | Amy Tan | ||
| fd732b1 | Being able to restrain my emotions isn't a great victory--it's the pitiful proof of lost love. | Amy Tan | ||
| c0410d9 | My mother and I never really understood one another. We translated each other's meanings and I seemed to hear less than what was said, while my mother heard more. | Amy Tan | ||
| c43473e | Yet part of me also thinks the whole idea makes perfect sense. The three of us, leaving our differences behind, stepping on the plane together, sitting side by side, lifting off, moving West to reach the East. | Amy Tan | ||
| fd8c40f | That is the problem with modern ink from a bottle. You do not have to think. You simply write what is swimming on the top of your brain. And the top is nothing but pond scum, dead leaves, and mosquito spawn. But when you push an inkstick along an inkstone, you take the first step to cleansing your mind and your heart. You push and you ask yourself, What are my intentions? What is in my heart that matches my mind? I | Amy Tan | ||
| 36a39ac | My mother believed in God's will for many years. It was af if she had turned on a celestial faucet and goodness kept pouring out. She said it was faith that kept all these good things coming our way, only I thought she said "fate" because she couldn't pronounce the "th" sound in "faith". And later I discovered that maybe it was fate all along, that faith was just an illusion that somehow you're in control. I found out the most could have.. | fate god luck | Amy Tan | |
| 6658585 | I will use this sharp pain to penetrate my daughter's tough skin and cut her tiger spirit loose. She will fight me, because this is the nature of two tigers. But I will win and give her my spirit, because this is the way a mother loves her daughter. | Amy Tan | ||
| deb58e8 | I daydream about a high school where everybody plays the harmonica: the students, the teachers, the principal, the janitor and the cook in the cafeteria. | Richard Brautigan | ||
| 0aa5422 | The novelist works neither to correct nor to condone, not at all to comfort, but to make what's told alive. | novelist writing | Eudora Welty | |
| 543bec1 | Yukiko rolled over. That plain, that simple. Her body was small in its moving. And her hair followed, dreaming her as she moved. A cat, her cat, in bed with her was awakened by her moving, and watched her turn slowly over in bed. When she stopped moving, the cat went back to sleep. It was a black cat and could have been a suburb of her hair. | Richard Brautigan | ||
| 996b864 | I like to think (it has to be!) of a cybernetic ecology where we are free of our labors and joined back to nature, returned to our mammal brothers and sisters, and all watched over by machines of loving grace. | Richard Brautigan |