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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 32d455c | In accepting an honorary degree from the University of Notre Dame a few years ago, General David Sarnoff made this statement: "We are too prone to make technological instruments the scapegoats for the sins of those who wield them. The products of modern science are not in themselves good or bad; it is the way they are used that determines their value." | Marshall McLuhan | ||
| d107ca9 | War and the fear of war have always been considered the main incentives to technological extension of our bodies. Indeed, Lewis Mumford, in his The City in History, considers the walled city itself an extension of our skins, as much as housing and clothing. More even than the preparation for war, the aftermath of invasion is a rich technological period; because the subject culture has to adjust all its sense ratios to accommodate the impact.. | Marshall McLuhan | ||
| 6ca68d3 | It is not brains or intelligence that is needed to cope with the problems with Plato and Aristotle and all of their successors to the present have failed to confront. What is needed is a readiness to undervalue the world altogether. This is only possible for a Christian... All technologies and all cultures, ancient and modern, are part of our immediate expanse. There is hope in this diversity since it creates vast new possibilities of detac.. | marshall-mcluhan media | Marshall McLuhan | |
| f991f1c | they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality. | Marshall McLuhan | ||
| 4f27b65 | Until writing was invented, man lived in an acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, in the dark of the mind, in the world of emotion, by primordial intuition, by terror. Speech is a social chart of this bog. The goose quill put an end to talk. It abolished mystery; it gave architecture and towns; it brought roads and armies, bureaucracy. It was the basic metaphor with which the cycle of civilization began, the step from the d.. | Marshall McLuhan | ||
| 841abd2 | The job of art is not to store moments of experience but to explore environments that are otherwise invisible. Art is not a retrieval system of precious moments of past cultures. Art has a live, ongoing function. | media | Marshall McLuhan | |
| acaefe0 | He seems to be supporting her tenderly. But what holds them together is difficult to pin down. In her memoir, she wrote that he once dropped her on her hip very painfully, and she had the distinct impression he'd done it on purpose. What really goes on between two people is very difficult to say. | dance relationships merce-cunningham | Barbara Browning | |
| ac1adec | Guess you never know how much you like the water until the well runs dry, and if I can't have your love unconditionally, then I'll just have to do without it until you grow up. | Carolyn Brown | ||
| 3d4820d | But my poor Saul, there's no help for you, you're heading straight for it. What about all those marvelous people we know, aged about fifty or sixty? Well, there are a few of them...marvelous, mature, wise people. Real people, the phrase is, radiating serenity. And how did they get to be that way? Well, we know, don't we? Every blood one of them's got a history of emotional crime, oh the sad bleeding corpses that litter the road to maturity .. | Doris Lessing | ||
| c28eddb | Oh, no, I'm not saying she isn't a nut -- she is -- but I've noticed before that sometimes someone like that behaves quite ordinarily with everybody, manages everything, you'd never think she was a nut, but there's just one person, with that person, she's out of control. It makes you wonder,' said Alice. | Doris Lessing | ||
| 3ed11c1 | It was not a question of Philip's having "lost hold." He had never grasped hold. Something had not happened that should have happened: a teacher, or someone, should have said: This one, Philip Fowler, he must be a craftsman, do something small, and delicate and intricate; we must get him trained for that. Look how perfectly he does things! He can't fold a shirt or arrange some chips and a piece of fish on a plate without making a picture of.. | Doris Lessing | ||
| f6c7e48 | As for Anna she was thinking: If I join in now, in a what's-wrong-with-men session, then I won't go home, I'll stay for lunch and all afternoon, and Molly and I will feel warm and friendly, all barriers gone. And when we part, there'll be a sudden resentment, a rancour--because after all, our real loyalties are always to men, and not to women...Anna nearly sat down, ready to submerge herself. But she did not. She thought: I want to be done .. | Doris Lessing | ||
| 7a79a0b | My sense of urgency is very simple,' said the professor, 'I've remembered that much. It's because what I have to remember has to do with time running out. And that's what anxiety is, in a lot of people. They know they have to do something, they should be doing something else, not just living hand-to-mouth, putting paint on their faces and decorating their caves and playing nasty tricks on their rivals. No. They have to do something else bef.. | Doris Lessing | ||
| 5600ae2 | The stinting poverty in which they lived was unbearable; it was destroying them. It did not mean that there was not enough to eat: it meant that every penny must be watched, new clothes foregone, amusements abandoned, holidays kept in the never-never-land of the future. A poverty that allows a tiny margin for spending, but which is shadowed always by a weight of debt that nags like a conscience, is worse than starvation itself. That was how.. | Doris Lessing | ||
| 0a93ee3 | You weren't supposed to choose me," he said. Behind them, Ira approached, stunned and speechless for what must have been the first time in his life. He helped lift Samuel, whose cheeks had blanched as well. Camille prodded Oscar's arms and stomach and face. It was truly him. The unbearable grief over losing him flipped inside out. Her joy ran so deep and strong she thought she might burst from it. "The night the went down, you rowed to me.. | Angie Frazier | ||
| 4b45f5a | Mas como era extraordinaria aquela sala cheia de gente -- ou melhor, de animais -, a olhar na mesma direccao, para outros animais mascarados e treinados para representar num palco, para animais cobertos de tecido e bocados de peles, ornamentados com pedras e de rostos e garras pintados. Toda a gente acabara de comer um animal de qualquer especie; as peles que se viam por toda a parte, apesar de a noite estar quente, provinham de animas que .. | life conscience | Doris Lessing | |
| dd83c90 | For many thousands of years people had looked at expensive heads of hair and thought of how much food and warmth they represented, so obviously it was a thought of no use at all, so why bother to have it? But thoughts of this sort did go ticking on, useless or not. | Doris Lessing | ||
| 36481b7 | If someone cracks up, what does that mean? At what point does a person about to fall to pieces say: I'm cracking up? And if I were to crack up, what form would it take? | Doris Lessing | ||
| 7b791fd | Standardisation of intellectual and emotional patterns had become extreme. A main mechanism for achieving this was a device that supplied identical indoctrinational material simultaneously into every living or working unit, whether that of a single person, a family, or an institution, through a whole country. These programmes were standardised, particularly for children. At best they reinforced a low level of ethic--kindness to animals, for.. | Doris Lessing | ||
| 2f99e84 | She thought secretly that there is no more dangerous item in the world than a pretty young woman on the loose. Luckily, the older woman thought, when we are girls we don't know that we are like sticks of dynamite or like fireworks in a box too close to a fire. | Doris Lessing | ||
| e8a2690 | What does it matter if two brains are isomorphic, or quasi-isomorphic, or not isomorphic at all? The answer is that we have an intuitive sense that, although other people differ from us in important ways, they are still 'the same' as we are in some deep and important ways. It would be instructive to be able to pinpoint what this invariant core of human intelligence is, and then to be able to describe the kinds of 'embellishments' which can .. | science | Douglas R. Hofstadter | |
| 2e6330b | As the physicist Paul Davies puts it, 'If everything needs everything else, how did the communities of molecules ever arise in the first place?' It is rather as if all the ingredients in your kitchen somehow got together and baked themselves into a cake - but a cake that could moreover divide when necessary to produce more cakes. It is little wonder that we call it the miracle of life. It is also little wonder that we have barely begun to u.. | science chemistry | Bill Bryson | |
| 1a7ab8b | Perhaps there are many "nows" of varying duration, depending on just what it is we are doing. We must face up to the fact that, at least in the case of humans, the subject experiencing subjective time is not a perfect, structureless observer, but a complex, multilayered, multifaceted psyche. Different levels of our consciousness may experience time in quite different ways. This is evidently the case in terms of response time. You have proba.. | time now time-passing physics | Paul Davies | |
| 3ac097b | It seemed necessary just then to touch base with the Lord. Shutting my eyes, I leaned into the horse. I prayed in words for a little while . . . and then language went away and I prayed in a soft high-pitched lament any human listener would've termed a whine. We serve a patient God. . . . Andreeson, who I'd despised, now appeared to my mind as he might've to a worried brother. Talk about an unwelcome change. There in the cold, curled agains.. | Leif Enger | ||
| fef8bf3 | In times of dread it's good to have an old man along. An old man has seen worse. | Leif Enger | ||
| 964c25d | I loved that kite, that cinnamon hound. We were old friends. I had soared and laughed with that kite. It got me out on the perimeter. I felt I had failed it somehow, and rune too, even though he would've offered the string to Leer, just as I had. Thinking it over I became a bit less angry, and more proud of the kite itself: it had refused to be flown by Leer one moment longer. It broke the line and caught the next gust out of town. A perilo.. | Leif Enger | ||
| 1297919 | If you can't talk sense, don't talk at all. | Leif Enger | ||
| a1238d0 | Sleep that day was a warm pool in which I dove and stayed, sporadically lifting my head to sense the world. | Leif Enger | ||
| b35f22d | Once torched by truth, a little thing like faith is easy. | Leif Enger | ||
| 89bccc6 | A cowboy doesn't ask for much, that's my observation. A flashy ride, a pretty girl, momentary glory... | Leif Enger | ||
| d7732df | They came one at a time or in shy small groups. I remember when sea-kindly showed up, a sentimental favorite, followed by desiccated and massive. Brusque appeared all by itself, which seemed apt; merry and boisterous arrived together. This would be a good time to ask for your patience if I use an adjective too many now and again--even now, some years on, they're still returning. I'm just so glad to see them. | Leif Enger | ||
| 643c88a | I'm going to have to go out there. She had a mother and a brother. See who's still around and can look at this thing." "Harry, you sure you--" "You think I have a choice?" | Michael Connelly | ||
| 22b1110 | Sometimes the bad guys don't win. | Phyllis Reynolds Naylor | ||
| 4de64e5 | I know, but if I feel this bad for Gramps, how am I going to feel when it's Dad?" Tyler told me. "You'll feel even worse, of course, but you'll carry on, because happiness has a way of creeping in again. It really does," I said." | strength-of-character | Phyllis Reynolds Naylor | |
| ece28a9 | Sexually active? Sexually ? Patrick and I hadn't even learned the fine points of kissing yet! I marched on down. 'For your information,' I said from the doorway, as both Dad and Lester jerked to attention, 'I am about as sexually active as a bag of spinach, and if you want to keep me on the porch and not out in the park somewhere behind the bushes, you'll keep the stupid porch light off when I come home with a boy. | kissing sex light funny love bushes father-daughter-relationship porch sexually-active spinach yelling teenage-girl humerous park outrage teenage stupid teen boys father | Phyllis Reynolds Naylor | |
| 4e6ea58 | I hate that phrase: move on. Like no matter what happened or what you did, you just "move on," and that's supposed to make everything all right." | Phyllis Reynolds Naylor | ||
| 4773926 | The civilized people in the world, the ones who hide behind culture and art and politics... and even the law, they're the ones to watch out for. They've got that perfect disguise goin' for them, you know? But they're the most vicious. They're the most dangerous people on earth. | Michael Connelly | ||
| 14193c2 | Michael grinned. "Daideo, that woman is going to be my bride. She's going to give you an entire brood of great-grandchildren. She just doesn't know it yet." | Abbie Zanders | ||
| 98fe6b4 | The gravel road widened into a large turnaround where three similar looking and designed brothels sat waiting for customers. They were called Sheila's Front Porch, Tawny's High Five Ranch and Miss Delilah's House of Holies. "Nice," Rachel said as we surveyed the scene. "why are these places always named after women -- as if women actually own them?" "You got me. I guess Mister Dave's House of Holies wouldn't go over so well with the guys." .. | slavery women degradation brothels marketing prostitution exploitation | Michael Connelly | |
| e7ed70c | it's like the laws of physics--for every action, there is an opposite and equal reaction. If you go into darkness, the darkness goes into you. You then have to decide what to do with it. How to keep yourself safe from it. How to keep it from hollowing you out. | Michael Connelly | ||
| 0f00f6c | Nobody in this world is who they say they are. Nobody. Not when they're in their own room with the door shut and locked. And nobody knows anybody, no matter what they think... The best you can hope for is to know yourself. And sometimes when you do, when you see your true self, you have to turn away. | Michael Connelly | ||
| 71f0630 | There was still chicken on the bone but sometimes you just have to push the plate away. | Michael Connelly | ||
| 8e86870 | Everybody counts or nobody counts. | Michael Connelly | ||
| aa9817b | Bosch counted twenty-two names and it made him miss the old Los Angeles Times. In 1993 it was big and strong, its editions fat with ads and stories produced by a staff of some of the best and brightest journalists in their field. Now the paper looked like somebody who had been through chemo--thin, unsteady, and knowing the inevitable could only be held off for so long. | Michael Connelly |