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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 23d3401 | Tell me,' he said, 'what is this thing about time? Why is it better to be late than early? People are always saying, we must wait. What are they waiting for? | James Baldwin | ||
| e92e8b0 | Loving anybody and being loved by anybody is a tremendous danger, a tremendous responsibility. Loving of children, raising of children. The terrors homosexuals go through in this society would not be so great if the society itself did not go through so many terrors which it doesn't want to admit. The discovery of one's sexual preference doesn't have to be a trauma. It's a trauma because it's such a traumatized society. | James Baldwin | ||
| 6158be5 | All the western nations are caught in a lie, the lie of their pretended humanism: this means that their history has no moral justification, and that the West has no moral authority. | James Baldwin | ||
| 9246980 | It is rare indeed that people give. Most people guard and keep; they suppose that it is they themselves and what they identify with themselves that they are guarding and keeping, whereas what they are actually guarding and keeping is their system of reality and what they assume themselves to be. One can give nothing whatever without giving oneself -- that is to say, risking oneself. If one cannot risk oneself, then one is simply incapable o.. | James Baldwin | ||
| 8e674a5 | Time catches up with kingdoms and crushes them, gets its teeth into doctrines and rends them; time reveals the foundations on which any kingdom rests, and eats at those foundations, and it destroys doctrines by proving them to be untrue. | James Baldwin | ||
| 427ebc3 | I have been carried into precinct basements often enough, and I have seen and heard and endured the secrets of desperate white men and women, which they knew were safe with me, because even if I should speak, no one would believe me. And they would not believe me precisely because they would know that what I said was true. | James Baldwin | ||
| 4e27296 | Eat my heart Chew it hard Swallow my soul, too | Robert Cormier | ||
| d67907b | He looks at me fondly. I know that the look doesn't have love in it. Or even lust. I still wonder about love or sex or lust. I saw lust in his eyes when he looked at that girl on the sidewalk ... I love him, anyway. I love him because he's kind to me and he doesn't want my body, doesn't want to feel me or touch me, like all the others ... and maybe after a while he might look at me with more than fondness, will kiss me sweetly, tenderly. | Robert Cormier | ||
| 5fc29f3 | The Goober was beautiful when he ran. His long arms and legs moved flowingly and flawlessly, his body floating as if his feet weren't touching the ground. When he ran, he forgot about his acne and his awkwardness and the shyness that paralyzed him when a girl looked his way. Even his thoughts became sharper, and things were simple and uncomplicated--he could solve math problems when he ran or memorize football play patterns. Often he rose e.. | Robert Cormier | ||
| c98f365 | I could very calmly go wild. | Annie Dillard | ||
| 76db0ad | The silence is all there is. It is the alpha and the omega. It is God's brooding over the face of the waters; it is the blended note of the ten thousand things, the whine of wings. | Annie Dillard | ||
| ba19902 | The obverse of this freedom, of course, is that your work is so meaningless, so fully for yourself alone, and so worthless to the world, that no one except you cares whether you do it well, or ever. | Annie Dillard | ||
| 0a1b520 | It's a scary thing, when a person you admire is suddenly revealed to be absolutely, truly human. | Kate Jacobs | ||
| 99e1717 | Electrons, when they were first discovered, behaved exactly like particles or bullets, very simply. Further research showed, from electron diffraction experiments for example, that they behaved like waves. As time went on there was a growing confusion about how these things really behaved ---- waves or particles, particles or waves? Everything looked like both. This growing confusion was resolved in 1925 or 1926 with the advent of the corre.. | philosophy physics quantum-mechanics science | Richard P. Feynman | |
| 869cc99 | don't know what's the matter with people: they don't learn by understanding; they learn by some other way--by rote, | Richard P. Feynman | ||
| c900dc6 | I won't have anything to do with the Nobel Prize . . . it's a pain in the . . . (LAUGHS). I don't like honors. | Richard P. Feynman | ||
| 2064e06 | The uncertainty principle "protects" quantum mechanics. Heisenberg recognized that if it were possible to measure the momentum and the position simultaneously with a greater accuracy, the quantum mechanics would collapse. So he proposed that it must be impossible." | Richard P. Feynman | ||
| 0474e0b | alone, and start to think. There are the rushing waves . . . mountains of molecules, each stupidly minding its own business . . . trillions apart . . . yet forming white surf in unison. Ages on ages . . . before any eyes could see . . . year after year . . . thunderously pounding the shore as now. For whom, for what? . . . on a dead planet, with no life to entertain. Never at rest . . . tortured by energy . . . wasted prodigiously by the su.. | Richard P. Feynman | ||
| b61acff | Even with the benefit of steroids most modern players still couldn't hit as many home runs as Babe Ruth hit on hotdogs. | euros performance-enhancing-drugs | Bill Bryson | |
| 25a52f7 | I believe, therefore, that although it is not the case today, that there may some day come a time, I should hope, when it will fully appreciated that the power of governments should be limited; that governments ought not to be empowered to decide the validity of scientific theories, that this is a ridiculous thing for them to try to do; that they are not to decide the description of history or of economic theory or of philosophy. | science | Richard P. Feynman | |
| b774559 | CURIOSITY DEMANDS THAT WE ASK QUESTIONS, THAT WE TRY TO PUT THINGS TOGETHER AND TRY TO UNDERSTAND THIS MULTITUDE OF ASPECTS AS PERHAPS RESULTING FROM THE ACTION OF A RELATIVELY SMALL NUMBER OF ELEMENTAL THINGS AND FORCES ACTING IN AN INFINITE VARIETY OF COMBINATIONS | particles physics science | Richard P. Feynman | |
| 7d3fd00 | This is not a new idea; this is the idea of the age of reason. This is the philosophy that guided the men that made the democracy that we live under. The idea that no one really knew how to run a government led to the idea that we should arrange a system by which new ideas could be developed, tried out, and tossed out if necessary, with more new ideas brought in--a trial and error system. | reason trial-and-error | Richard P. Feynman | |
| f70524f | Mathematics is not a science from our point of view, in the sense that it is not a natural science. The test of its validity is not experiment. | Richard P. Feynman | ||
| 09a7924 | The exception proves that the rule is wrong." That is the principle of science. If there is an exception to any rule, and if it can be proved by observation, that rule is wrong." | Richard P. Feynman | ||
| adbcd76 | It is probably better to realize that the probability concept is in a sense subjective, that it is always based on uncertain knowledge, and that its quantitative evaluation is subject to change as we obtain more information. | Richard P. Feynman | ||
| 816964d | Widespread commercial distribution of ice was so new that 300 tons of the precious commodity melted at one port while customs officials tried to figure out how to classify it. | government innovation | Bill Bryson | |
| ddbe262 | Everyone has a supremely low moment somewhere along the AT, usually when the urge to quit the trail becomes almost overpowering. The irony of my moment was that I wanted to get back on the trail and didn't know how. I hadn't lost just Katz, my boon companion, but my whole sense of connectedness to the trail. I had lost my momentum, my feeling of purpose. In the most literal way I needed to find my feet again. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 300efe8 | I love everything about motels. I can't help myself. I still get excited every time I slip a key into a motel room door and fling it open. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 8a0bfa6 | Marrying cousins was astoundingly common into the nineteenth century, and nowhere is this better illustrated than with the Darwins and their cousins the Wedgwoods (of pottery fame). Charles married his first cousin Emma Wedgwood, daughter of his beloved Uncle Josiah. Darwin's sister Caroline, meanwhile, married Josiah Wedgwood III, Emma's brother and the Darwin siblings' joint first cousin. Another of Emma's brothers, Henry, married not a D.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 9d15339 | Out of the thirty thousand types of edible plants thought to exist on Earth, just eleven--corn, rice, wheat, potatoes, cassava, sorghum, millet, beans, barley, rye, and oats--account for 93 percent of all that humans eat, | Bill Bryson | ||
| 6be0b40 | Much as I hate to stand out in a crowd, I have this terrible occasional compulsion to make myself a source of merriment for the world, and I had come close to sealing new heights with a Russian hat. Now, clearly, that would be unnecessary. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 385f872 | Take a moment from time to time to remember that you are alive. I know this sounds a trifle obvious, but it is amazing how little time we take to remark upon this singular and gratifying fact. By most astounding stroke of luck and infinitesimal portion of all the matter in the universe came together to create you and for the tiniest moment in the great span of eternity you have the incomparable privilege to exist. For endless eons there was.. | inspirational life living | Bill Bryson | |
| 0c381a4 | America's industrial success produced a roll call of financial magnificence: Rockefellers, Morgans, Astors, Mellons, Fricks, Carnegies, Goulds, du Ponts, Belmonts, Harrimans, Huntingtons, Vanderbilts, and many more based in dynastic wealth of essentially inexhaustible proportions. John D. Rockefeller made $1 billion a year, measured in today's money, and paid no income tax. No one did, for income tax did not yet exist in America. Congress t.. | money new-york parties wealth | Bill Bryson | |
| 8cc07b5 | According to Time Out magazine, at any given moment there are 600,000 people on the Underground, making it both a larger and more interesting place than Oslo. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 053cf4b | For a long time it was assumed that anything so miraculously energetic as radioactivity must be beneficial. For years, manufacturers of toothpaste and laxatives put radioactive thorium in their products, and at least until the late 1920s the Glen Springs Hotel in the Finger Lakes region of New York (and doubtless others as well) featured with pride the therapeutic effects of its 'Radio-active mineral springs27'. It wasn't banned in consumer.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 1ea204b | The real significance of Magellan's voyage was not that it was the first to circumnavigate the planet, but that it was the first to realize just how big that planet was. | globe history magellan | Bill Bryson | |
| 2374905 | Just a month after the completion of the Declaration of Independence, at a time when he delegates might have been expected to occupy themselves with more pressing concerns -like how they were going to win the war and escape hanging- Congress quite extraordinarily found time to debate business for a motto for the new nation. (Their choice, E Pluribus Unum, "One from Many", was taken from, of all places, a recipe for salad in an early poem by.. | humor language | Bill Bryson | |
| 0525af0 | From almost nothing, France in four years built up an aircraft industry that employed nearly 200,000 people and produced some 70,000 planes. Britain built 55,000 planes, Germany 48,000, and Italy 20,000 - quite an advance bearing in mind that only a few years earlier the entire world aviation industry consisted of two brothers in a bicycle shop in Ohio. | Bill Bryson | ||
| debf5e0 | I wondered idly what the builders of Stonehenge would have created if they'd had bulldozers and big trucks for moving materials and computers to help them design. What would they have created if they had had all the tools we have? Then I crested the brow of the hill with a view down to the visitor center, with its cafe and gift shop, its land trains and giant parking lot, and realized I was almost certainly looking at it. | Bill Bryson | ||
| fa5ce04 | It was a lot more fun to get famous than to be famous. | fame humility popularity solitude | Bill Bryson | |
| 90337c2 | The romance of travel wasn't always terribly evident to those who were actually experiencing it. | travel wonderlust | Bill Bryson | |
| a5758ce | The core of a neutron star is so dense that a single spoonful of matter from it would weigh more than 500 billion kilograms. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 4d9f876 | There is no question that a Neanderthal could easily beat us up. So, too, presumably could their women, which may be why we are only 2 percent Neanderthal instead of 50 percent. Those bitches were too scary for us. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 2b6c3c1 | Italians are entirely without any commitment to order. They live their lives in a kind of pandemonium, which I find very attractive. | Bill Bryson |