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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 1628d45 | And there are plays - and books and songs and poems and dances - that are perhaps upsetting or intricate or unusual, that leave you unsure, but which you think about perhaps the next day, and perhaps for a week, and perhaps for the rest of your life. Because they aren't clean, they aren't neat, but there's something in them that comes from the heart, and, so, goes to the heart. | David Mamet | ||
| 139f16a | And there are plays - and books and songs and poems and dances - that are perhaps upsetting or intricate or unusual, that leave you unsure, but which you think about perhaps the next day, and perhaps for a week, and perhaps for the rest of your life. Because they aren't clean, they aren't neat, but there's something in them that comes from the heart, and, so, goes to the heart. What comes from the head is perceived by the audience, the chil.. | David Mamet | ||
| ab44536 | The Chicago literary tradition is born not out of its Universities, but out of the sports desk and the city desk of its newspapers. Hemingway revolutionized English prose. His inspiration was the telegraph, whose use, at Western Union, taught this: every word costs something, This, of course, is the essence of poetry, which is the essence of great prose. Chicagoan literature came from the newspaper, whose purpose, in those days, was to Tel.. | writing | David Mamet | |
| 6b01ec5 | The baby boomer generation, my own, is content, if of the Left, to live out our remaining years upon the work and upon the entitlements created by our parents, and to entail the costs upon our children--to tax industry out of the country, to tax wealth away from its historical role and use as the funder of innovation. | David Mamet | ||
| e3bd521 | When you come into the theater, you have to be willing to say, "We're all here to undergo a communion, to find out what is going on in this world." If you're not willing to say that, what you get is entertainment instead of art, and poor entertainment at that." | David Mamet | ||
| edae8e2 | If you ask a twenty-one-year-old poet whose poetry he likes, he might say, unblushing, "Nobody's," In his youth, he has not yet understood that poets like poetry, and novelists like novels; he himself likes only the role, the thought of himself in a hat." | artistry literature poet poetic poetry pretentious pretentiousness the-writing-life write writer writing writing-advice | Annie Dillard | |
| d25a852 | Write as if you were dying. | Annie Dillard | ||
| 9516546 | The higher Christian churches...come at God with an unwarranted air of professionalism, with authority and pomp, as though they knew what they were doing, as though people in themselves were an appropriate set of creatures to have dealings with God. I often think of the set pieces of liturgy as certain words which people have successfully addressed to God without their getting killed. In the high churches they saunter through the liturgy li.. | church god high-church low-church | Annie Dillard | |
| 0e1b739 | Last year I had a very unusual experience. I was awake, with my eyes closed, when I had a dream. It was a small dream about time. I was dead, I guess, in deep black space high up among many white stars. My own consciousness had been disclosed to me, and I was happy. Then I saw far below me a long, curved band of color. As I came closer, I saw that it stretched endlessly in either direction, and I understood that I was seeing all the time of.. | dreams history memory nature reality | Annie Dillard | |
| ca1d222 | I seem to be on a road, walking, greeting the hedgerows, the rose-hips, the apples and thorn. I seem to be on a road, walking, familiar with neighbors, high-handed with cattle, smelling the sea, and alone. Already, I know the names of things. I can kick a stone. | Annie Dillard | ||
| ad7de5f | Am I living?'...I forgot myself, and sank into dim and watery oblivion. | Annie Dillard | ||
| 0d0b796 | Eskimo: "If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?" Priest: "No, not if you did not know." Eskimo: "Then why did you tell me?" Annie Dillard, "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek" | George Washington | ||
| 6478149 | A kind of northing is what I wish to accomplish, a single-minded trek towards that place where any shutter left open to the zenith at night will record the wheeling of all the sky's stars as a pattern of perfect, concentric circles. I seek a reduction, a shedding, a sloughing off. At the seashore you often see a shell, or fragment of a shell, that sharp sands and surf have thinned to a wisp. There is no way you can tell what kind of shell .. | beauty belief consciousness creation curiosity disbelief energy enoughness epiphany exploration exultant faith fate fearless fire free freedom gaps god grace growth hallelujah humility illumination intricacy joy joyful joyfulness life-force light living-in-the-present-moment mindfulness multiplicity mystery nature philosopher-s-stone philosophy poem poet poetry power praise prayer prayers praying religion religious-diversity ring-the-bells science seeing seeking soul spirit stalking-the-gaps the-tree-with-the-lights-in-it tolerance walking watching wonder | Annie Dillard | |
| c686dff | Our interpreting the universe as an artifact absolutely requires that we posit an author for it, or a celestial fimmaker, dramatist, painter, sculptor, composer, architect, or choreographer. And no one has been willing openly to posit such an artist for the universe since the American transcedentalists and before them the Medieval European philosophers. | Annie Dillard | ||
| 7c1a730 | Writing every book, the writer must solve two problems: Can it be done? and, Can I do it? Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles. | writers-on-writing-books-writing | Annie Dillard | |
| 72085f0 | Were the earth smooth, our brains would be smooth as well; we would wake, blink, walk two steps to get the whole picture, and lapse into a dreamless sleep. | Annie Dillard | ||
| e2c7154 | Is it not late? A late time to be living? Are not our generations the crucial ones? For we have changed the world. Are not our heightened times the important ones? For we have nuclear bombs. Are we not especially significant because our century is? - our century and its unique Holocaust, its refugee populations, its serial totalitarian exterminations; our century and its antibiotics, silicon chips, men on the moon, and spliced genes? No, we.. | perspective reality | Annie Dillard | |
| c0dc6c6 | I suspect that the real moral thinkers end up, wherever they may start, in botany. | Annie Dillard | ||
| 16a0c71 | The death of self of which the great writers speak is no violent act. It is merely the joining of the great rock heart of the earth in its roll. It is merely the slow cessation of the will's spirits and the intellect's chatter: it is waiting like a hollow bell with a stilled tongue. Fuge, tace, quiesce. The waiting itself is the thing. | Annie Dillard | ||
| 23548fb | What's different? Sweat, risk, uncertainty, inconvenience. But also, awe. Pride. Something ineffably splendid and stirring. | Mary Roach | ||
| 1b881d1 | Please beware," came his reply, "There are a lot of people who believe that just because we don't have an explanation for something, it's quantum mechanics." | belief believe paranormal physics quantum-physics | Mary Roach | |
| dd71f04 | Not that there's anything wrong with just lying around on your back. In it's way, rotting is interesting too, as we will see. It's just that there are other ways to spend your time as a cadaver. | science | Mary Roach | |
| 3b523c1 | Ability to Function Despite Imminent Catastrophe. | Mary Roach | ||
| dff1f3b | Sometimes courage is nothing more than a willingness to think differently than those around you. In a culture of conformity, that's braver than it sounds. | Mary Roach | ||
| ef89c4d | This is what primate sex hormones do: "They make individuals perceive other individuals as more attractive than they'd normally perceive them." Hormones are nature's three bottles of beer." | Mary Roach | ||
| 4814bbc | According to more than one astronaut memoir, one of the most beautiful sights in space is that of a sun-illumined flurry of flash-frozen waste-water droplets. Space doesn't just encompass the sublime and the ridiculous. It erases the line between. | Mary Roach | ||
| 287906e | My interpreter Sayuri is folding a piece of notebook paper. She is at step 21, where the crane's body is inflated. The directions show a tiny puff besides an arrow pointing at the bird. It makes sense if you already know what to do. Otherwise, it's wonderfully surreal: | Mary Roach | ||
| 5cc755d | Cheese crumbs spread in front of a copulating pair of rats may distract the female, but not the male. | Mary Roach | ||
| 334fa3a | If you lower your head to within a foot or two of an infested corpse (and this I truly don't recommend), you can hear them feeding. Arpad pinpoints the sound: "Rice Krispies." Ron frowns. Ron used to like Rice Krispies." | Mary Roach | ||
| 7425fb2 | Gravitation is the lust of the cosmos. | Mary Roach | ||
| 4b23011 | The M16 has a scope with a small red arrow in the center of the sight. You align the arrow with what or (jeez) whom you wish to shoot and squeeze the trigger. Both "squeeze" and "pull" are exaggerations of the motion applied to this trigger. It's a trivial, tiny movement, the twitch of a dreaming child. So quick and so effortless is it that it's hard for me to associate it with any but the most inconsequential of acts. Flipping a page. Typi.. | Mary Roach | ||
| 9427f84 | So animated are these freestanding hearts that surgeons have been known to drop them. "We wash them off and they do just fine," replied New York heart transplant surgeon Mehmet Oz when I asked him about it. I imagined the heart slipping across the linoleum, the looks exchanged, the rush to retrieve it and clean it off, like a bratwurst that's rolled off the plate in a restaurant kitchen." | Mary Roach | ||
| 260fbf8 | All good research--whether for science or for a book--is a form of obsession. | Mary Roach | ||
| 6d622f5 | Breast milk and amniotic fluid carry the flavors of the mother's foods, and studies consistently show that babies grow up to be more accepting of flavors they've sampled while in the womb and while breastfeeding. | Mary Roach | ||
| 2d130fe | With the rise of classical Greece, the soul debate evolved into the more familiar heart-versus-brain, the liver having been demoted to an accessory role. We are fortunate that this is so, for we would otherwise have been faced with Celine Dion singing "My Liver Belongs to You" and movie houses playing The Liver Is a Lonely Hunter. Every Spanish love song that contains the word corazon, which is all of them, would contain the somewhat less l.. | humor liver science soul | Mary Roach | |
| 0788ddf | I guess I feel the same way about being a corpse. Why lie around on your back when you can do something interesting and new, something useful? | Mary Roach | ||
| f2edfc4 | I like the term "decedent." It's as though the man weren't dead, but merely involved in some sort of protracted legal dispute. For evident reasons, mortuary science is awash with euphemisms. "Don't say stiff, corpse, cadaver," scolds The Principles and Practice of Embalming. "Say decedent, remains or Mr. Blank. Don't say 'keep.' Say 'maintain preservation.'..."Wrinkles are "acquired facial markings." Decomposed brain that filters down throu.. | Mary Roach | ||
| 057162f | Kissing is a less aggressive form of bacterial transplant. Studies of three different gingivitis-causing bacteria have documented migration from spouse to spouse. Periodontically speaking, an affair might be viewed as a form of bacteriotherapy. | Mary Roach | ||
| 917a370 | This is the age of the specialist, and years ago Rollo had settled on his career. Even as a boy, hardly capable of connected thought, he had been convinced that his speciality, the one thing he could do really well, was to inherit money. | the-feudal-spirit the-peter-principle | P.G. Wodehouse | |
| da6a937 | She had turned away and was watching a duck out on the lake. It was tucking into weeds, a thing I've never been able to understand anyone wanting to do. Though I suppose, if you face it squarely, they're no worse than spinach. | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| 027c405 | More and more clearly as the scones disappeared into his interior he saw that what the sensible man wanted was a wife and a home with scones like these always at his diposal. | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| 41f931f | You can't press your suit and another fellow's trousers simultaneously. | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| e5437d1 | The High Street was full of farmers, cows, and other animals, the majority of the former well on the road to intoxication. It is, of course, extremely painful to see a man in such a condition, but when such a person in endeavouring to count a perpetually moving drove of pigs, the onlooker's pain is sensibly diminished. | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| 0fca443 | Deep down in his heart the genuine Englishman has a rugged distaste for seeing his country invaded by a foreign army. People were asking themselves by what right these aliens had overrun British soil. An ever-growing feeling of annoyance had begun to lay hold of the nation. | P.G. Wodehouse |