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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 194f56d | Could he have meant--hell, he must have meant the principle, that we were to affirm the principle on which the country was built and not the men, or at least not the men who did the violence. Did he mean say "yes" because he knew that the principle was greater than the men, greater than the numbers and the vicious power and all the methods used to corrupt its name? Did he mean to affirm the principle, which they themselves had dreamed into .. | Ralph Ellison | ||
| d7f7445 | Three days a week she helped at the Manor Nursing Home, where people proved their keenness by reciting received analyses of current events. All the Manor residents watched television day and night, informed to the eyeballs like everyone else and rushed for time, toward what end no one asked. Their cupidity and self-love were no worse than anyone else's, but their many experiences' having taught them so little irked Lou. One hated tourists, .. | human-nature | Annie Dillard | |
| 060661f | If indeed [nature] has no greater aim than to provide a home for her greatest experiment, Man, it would be just like her methods to scatter a million stars wherof one might haply achieve her purpose. | Annie Dillard | ||
| 34c9044 | The rock I'd seen in my life looked dull because in all ignorance I'd never thought to knock it open. People have cracked ordinary New England pegmatite - big, coarse granite - and laid bare clusters of red garnets, or topaz crystals, chrysoberyl, spodumene, emerald. They held in their hands crystals that had hung in a hole in the dark for a billion years unseen. I was all for it. I would lay about me right and left with a hammer, and bash.. | discovery geology memoir rock-collecting rocks wonder | Annie Dillard | |
| 631383d | Children ten years old wake up and find themselves here, discover themselves to have been here all along; is this sad? They wake like sleepwalkers, in full stride; they wake like people brought back from cardiac arrest or from drowning: , surrounded by familiar people and objects, equipped with a hundred skills. They know the neighborhood, they can read and write English, they are old hands at the commonplace mysteries, and yet they feel t.. | childhood consciousness self | Annie Dillard | |
| dd8f417 | I couldn't unpeach the peaches. | Annie Dillard | ||
| b72615f | Naturally society cherished itself alone; it prized what everyone agreed was precious, despised what everyone agreed was despicable, and ignored what no one mentioned-all to it's own enhancement, and with the loud view that these bubbles and vapors were eternal and universal. If June had stressed to Mabel that she was going to die, would she have learned to eat with a fork? Society's loyal members, having sacrificed their only lives to it's.. | Annie Dillard | ||
| 1500199 | This hospital, like every other, is a hole in the universe through which holiness issues in blasts. It blows both ways, in and out of time. | Annie Dillard | ||
| d8ff4b0 | Many fine people were out there living, people whose consciences permitted them to sleep at night despite their not having written a decent sentence that day, or ever. | Annie Dillard (Author) | ||
| e8cf66d | What is the difference between a cathedral and a physics lab? Are not they both saying: Hello? We spy on whales and on interstellar radio objects; we starve ourselves and pray till we're blue. | science space whale | Annie Dillard | |
| 1c77801 | For as long as I could remember, I had been transparent to myself, unselfconscious, learning, doing, most of every day. Now I was in my own way; I myself was a dark object I could not ignore. I couldn't remember how to forget myself. I didn't want to think about myself, to reckon myself in, to deal with myself every livelong minute on top of everything else - but swerve as I might, I couldn't avoid it. I was a boulder blocking my own path. .. | awakening consciousness selfconsciousness | Annie Dillard | |
| 2bd7f22 | Nature's silence is its one remark, and every flake of world is a chip off that old mute and immutable block. The Chiense say that we live in the world of ten thousand things. Each of the ten thousand things cries out to us precisely nothing. | listening nature | Annie Dillard | |
| dd8b2b1 | The sense impressions of one-celled animals are not edited for the brain: 'This is philosophically interesting in a rather mournful way, since it means that only the simplest animals perceive the universe as it is (21). | nature philosophy sight world | Annie Dillard | |
| 720bd18 | You can't test courage cautiously." (Annie Dillard)" | Marcia Quinn Noren | ||
| 95363d4 | Better to live your life open rather than exist on borrowed time, waiting for the great unmasking. | Kate Jacobs | ||
| 8831a4e | It's easy to look back and think how we could make only the good things happen to us,' counseled Catherine, still swishing her mop to and fro, spreading dirty water instead of soaking it up. 'But that's not how we become ourselves. You are mad who you are by the bad stuff, the little things, as much as the great triumphs and big decisions. | Kate Jacobs | ||
| 55afa62 | He was dimly angry with himself, he did not know why. It was that he had struck his wife. He had forgotten it, but was miserable about it, notwithstanding. And this misery was the voice of the great Love that had made him and his wife and the baby and Diamond, speaking in his heart, and telling him to be good. For that great Love speaks in the most wretched and dirty hearts; only the tone of its voice depends on the echoes of the place in w.. | heart love misery thunder voice | George MacDonald | |
| 598dc10 | I lived through those books, songs, television shows, and movies - the way the characters talked, looked, acted. I thought that could translate over into reality, that I could make their world my world. I wanted so badly to run away from my life. But you can't bury yourself in other people's pages and scenes. You aren't David Copperfield or Tom Sawyer. Those love songs on the radio might speak to you, but they're not about you or the person.. | life movies novels tv-shows | Jason Diamond | |
| 0213bb4 | Maybe. We're all equals at the dark gate, no? The sands run for us all. Life is but a flicker shouting into the jaws of eternity. But it seems so damned unfair! | Glen Cook | ||
| 6738bd4 | Philosophers have said before that one of the fundamental requisites of science is that whenever you set up the same conditions, the same thing must happen. This is simply not true, it is not a fundamental condition of science. | Richard P. Feynman | ||
| d424a1d | I'm not responsible for what other people think I am able to do; I don't have to be good because they think I'm going to be good. | Richard P. Feynman | ||
| 94a8395 | I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. | Richard P. Feynman | ||
| 1191df6 | But if you've ever worked with computers, you understand the disease--the delight in being able to see how much you can do. | Richard P. Feynman | ||
| c2e9155 | l ynbGy 'n nkhsh~ mn lshkW bl yjb 'n nrHWb bh wnnqshh | Richard P. Feynman | ||
| ec81ef8 | The only way to have real success in science, the field I'm familiar with, is to describe the evidence very carefully without regard to the way you feel it should be. If you have a theory, you must try to explain what's good and what's bad about it equally. In science, you learn a kind of standard integrity and honesty. | Richard Feynman | ||
| 5ea20f5 | What looks still to our crude eyes is a wild and dynamic dance. | Richard Feynman | ||
| 3259662 | I think, however, that there isn't any solution to this problem of education other than to realize that the best teaching can be done only when there is a direct individual relationship between a student and a good teacher --- a situation in which the student discusses the ideas, thinks about the things, and talks about the things. | educational-quotes | Richard Feynman | |
| 637725f | When it came time for me to give my talk on the subject, I started off by drawing an outline of the cat and began to name the various muscles. The other students in the class interrupt me: "We _know_ all that!" "Oh," I say, "you _do?_ Then no _wonder_ I can catch up with you so fast after you've had four years of biology." They had wasted all their time memorizing stuff like that, when it could be looked up in fifteen minutes." | Richard P. Feynman | ||
| 6c8feeb | The attempts to try to represent the electric field as the motion of some kind of gear wheels, or in terms of lines, or of stresses in some kind of material have used up more effort of physicists than it would have taken simply to get the right answers about electrodynamics. It is interesting that the correct equations for the behavior of light were worked out by MacCullagh in 1839. But people said to him: 'Yes, but there is no real materia.. | Richard P. Feynman | ||
| 5207020 | I was born not knowing and have only had a little time to change that here and there. | Richard Feynman | ||
| 5de2705 | I happen to know this, and I happen to know that, and maybe I know that;and I work everything out from there. Tomorrow I may forgot that this is true, but remember that something else is true, so I can reconstruct it all again. I am never quite sure of where I am supposed to begin or where I am supposed to end. I just remember enough all the time so that as the memory fades and some of the pieces fall out I can put the thing back together a.. | thoughts | Richard P. Feynman | |
| 05b92ca | Second, you are alive. For the tiniest moment in the span of eternity you have the miraculous privilege to exist. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 2164900 | I can never understand why Londoners fail to see that they live in the most wonderful city in the world. It is, if you ask me, far more beautiful and interesting than Paris and more lively than anywhere but New York--and even New York can't touch it in lots of important ways. It has more history, finer parks, a livelier and more varied press, better theaters, more numerous orchestras and museums, leafier squares, safer streets, and more cou.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| eb6398f | as the biologist J. B. S. Haldane once famously observed: "The universe is not only queerer than we suppose; it is queerer than we can suppose." The" | Bill Bryson | ||
| 3494add | As a rule, you knew it was time to eat when you could hear potatoes exploding in the oven. Happily, all this suited my father. His palate only responded to two tastes - burned and ice cream - so everything suited him so long as it was sufficiently dark and not startlingly flavorful. Theirs truly was a marriage made in heaven, for no one could burn food like my mother or eat it like my Dad. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 6e70078 | Eenie, meenie, minie, mo" is based on a counting system that predates the Roman occupation of Britain, that may even be pre-Celtic. If so, it is a rare surviving link with the very distant past. It not only gives us a fragmentary image of how children were being amused at the time Stonehenge was built, but tells us something about how their elders counted and thought and ordered their speech." | Bill Bryson | ||
| 29dd66a | It is easy to overlook this thought that life just is. As humans we are inclined to feel that life must have a point. We have plans and aspirations and desires. We want to take constant advantage of all the intoxicating existence we've been endowed with. But what's life to a lichen? Yet its impulse to exist, to be, is every bit as strong as ours - arguably even stronger. If I were told that I had to spend decades being a furry growth on a r.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| e8749d0 | Now as I stood on the roof of my house, taking in this unexpected view, it struck me how rather glorious it was that in two thousand years of human activity the only thing that had stirred the notice of the outside world even briefly was the finding of a Roman phallic pendant. The rest was just centuries of people quietly going about their daily business - eating, sleeping, having sex, endeavoring to be amused- and it occurred to me, with t.. | history sex sleeping | Bill Bryson | |
| 2bb6e58 | Mrs Loudon was even more successful than her husband thanks to a single work, Practical Instructions in Gardening for Ladies, published in 1841, which proved to be magnificently timely. It was the first book of any type ever to encourage women of elevated classes to get their hands dirty and even to take on a faint glow of perspiration. This was novel almost to the point of eroticism. Gardening for Ladies bravely insisted that women could m.. | humor | Bill Bryson | |
| 222c215 | I would rather have bowel surgery in the woods with a stick. If you are not stung or pronged to death in some unexpected manner, you may be fatally chomped by sharks or crocodiles, or carried helplessly out to sea by irresistible currents, or left to stagger to an unhappy death in the baking outback. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 7416b70 | On average the total walking of an American these days--that's walking of all types: from car to office, from office to car, around the supermarket and shopping malls--adds up to 1.4 miles a week, barely 350 yards a day. That's ridiculous. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 2e568b9 | The rooms were small and airless and cramped. To make matters worse, somebody in our group was making the most dreadful silent farts. Fortunately, it was me, so I wasn't nearly as bothered as the others. | Bill Bryson | ||
| b222bc8 | FOR SOME TIME, I have believed that everyone should be allowed to have, say, ten things that they dislike without having to justify or explain to anyone why they don't like them. Reflex loathings, I call them. Mine are: Power walkers. Those vibrating things restaurants give you to let you know when a table is ready. Television programs in which people bid on the contents of locked garages. All pigeons everywhere, at all times. Lawyers, too... | Bill Bryson | ||
| 2e115bf | So why, you are bound to ask at some point in your life, do microbes so often want to hurt us? What possible satisfaction could there be to a microbe in having us grow feverish or chilled, or disfigured with sores, or above all deceased? A dead host, after all, is hardly going to provide long-term hospitality. | Bill Bryson |