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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 574d6c5 | Because the persecuting majority is vile, says the liberal, therefore the persecuted minority must be stainlessly pure. Can't you see what nonsense that is? What's to prevent the bad from being persecuted by the worse? Did all the Christian victims in the arena have to be saints? | Christopher Isherwood | ||
| 0fa8b01 | There was nothing to be done with him and his kind - unless you were prepared to shoot them. | Christopher Isherwood | ||
| 7ab5131 | Up there in that room, as I see it, is the reading and the thinking-through, a theory of rivers, of trees moving, of falling light. Here on the river, as I lurch against a freshening of the current, is the practice of rivers. In navigating by the glow of the Milky Way, the practice of light. In steadying with a staff, the practice of wood. | meditation nature practice spirit thought | Barry Lopez | |
| 3916426 | Story, as I understood it by reading Faulkner, Hardy, Cather, and Hemingway, was a powerful and clarifying human invention. The language alone, as I discovered it in Gerard Manley Hopkins and Faulkner, was exquisitely beautiful, also weirdly and mysteriously evocative. | story | Barry Lopez | |
| e97210b | Every story is an act of trust between a writer and a reader: each story, in the end, is social. Whatever a writer sets down can help or harm a community of which he or she is a part. When I write I can imagine a child in California wishing to give away what he's just seen- a wild animal fleeing though creosote cover in the desert, casting a bright-eyed backward glance or three lines of overheard conversation that seem to contain everything.. | stories writing | Barry Lopez | |
| 3306736 | I watched the enormity of the clouds for several minutes. What I wanted to experience in the water, I realized, was how life of the reef was layered and intertwined. I now had many individual pieces at hand: named images, nouns. How were they related? What were the verbs? Which syntaxes were indigenous to the place? I asked a dozen knowledgeable people. No one was inclined to elaborate- or they didn't know. "Did you see the octopus?" Someon.. | diving mystery ocean reefs | Barry Lopez | |
| b4ae016 | Rather than sleep, Tibbets crawled through the thirty-foot tunnel to chat with the waist crew, wondering if they knew what they were carrying. "A chemist's nightmare," the tail gunner, Robert Caron, guessed, then "a physicist's nightmare." "Not exactly," Tibbets hedged. Tibbets was leaving by the time Caron put two and two together: 'Tibbets stayed a little longer, and then started to crawl forward up the tunnel. I remembered something else.. | Richard Rhodes | ||
| 46444c1 | Arguably the greatest technological triumph of the century has been the public-health system, which is sophisticated preventive and investigative medicine organized around mostly low- and medium-tech equipment; ... fully half of us are alive today because of the improvements. | life medicine public-health science technology triumph | Richard Rhodes | |
| 1654399 | Any account of science which does not explicitly describe it as something we believe in is essentially incomplete and a false pretense. It amounts to a claim that science is essentially different from and superior to all human beliefs that are not scientific statements--and this is untrue. | richard-rhodes science the-making-of-the-atomic-bomb | Richard Rhodes | |
| c2dfe68 | many things are possible just as long as you don't know they're impossible. | Norton Juster | ||
| ee0ecb6 | If you only do the easy and useless jobs, you'll never have to worry about the important ones which are so difficult. You just won't have the time. For there's always something to do to keep you from what you really should be doing, and if it weren't for that dreadful magic staff, you'd never know how much time you were wasting. | Norton Juster | ||
| 438b095 | Oh, don't worry about that," said the Mathemagician as he scooped up the pieces. "We use the broken ones for fractions." | Norton Juster | ||
| e4d955b | Of course, if you've ever gotten a surprise package, you can imagine how puzzled and excited Milo was; and if you've never gotten one, pay close attention, because someday you might. | Norton Juster | ||
| 44f0c0b | There's nothing to it," they all said in chorus, "if you have a magic staff." Then six of them cancelled themselves out and simply disappeared. "But it's only a big pencil," the Humbug objected, tapping at it with his cane. "True enough," agreed the Mathemagician; "but once you learn to use it, there's no end to what you can do." | Norton Juster | ||
| 98d59ec | Besides, being lost is never a matter of not knowing where you are; it's a matter of not knowing where you aren't--and I don't care at all about where I'm not. | Norton Juster | ||
| 4b2d89b | 1. Milo There was once a boy named Milo who didn't know what to do with himself--not just sometimes, but always. When he was in school he longed to be out, and when he was out he longed to be in. On the way he thought about coming home, and coming home he thought about going. Wherever he was he wished he were somewhere else, and when he got there he wondered why he'd bothered. Nothing really interested him--least of all the things that shou.. | Norton Juster | ||
| 6681664 | You must never feel badly about making mistakes," explained Reason quietly, "as long as you take the trouble to learn from them. For you often learn more by being wrong for the right reasons than you do by being right for the wrong reasons." | Norton Juster | ||
| b8451e7 | And it's much the same thing with knowledge, for whenever you learn something new, the whole world becomes that much richer. | Norton Juster | ||
| 9f76b52 | But that's just as bad," protested Milo. "You mean just as good," corrected the Humbug. "Things which are equally bad are also equally good. Try to look at the bright side of things." "I don't know which side of anything to look at," protested Milo. "Everything is so confusing and all your words only make things worse." | Norton Juster | ||
| e3e5670 | A slavish concern for the composition of words is the sign of a bankrupt intellect. | Norton Juster | ||
| a072f66 | A grin broke across Heath's hansome face. "The last time I saw such a collection of Boscastles in church was at Father's funeral. Who invited the mistresses?" "I think I did, "Grayson said, suppressing a yawn."God knows I've been sitting here so long my brain's gone stiff." "You invited them to a wedding?" "It's not my wedding thank God." "Well, it is your chapel." "Ergo I invite whom I please." "Someone might have thought to invite the gro.. | Jillian Hunter | ||
| 08b8c0c | I watch Stewart. He has the most interesting face. It is beautiful, young, almost childlike, and yet with a power and authority in his features. In another time he would have been a young warrior, a Lost Prince exiled from his kingdom. But he's from this time, this place, so he's just some "at risk" kid who can't find a place for himself in the straight world." | Blake Nelson | ||
| 3b7abdf | He holds me. I am his in a way he probably isn't even aware of. | Blake Nelson | ||
| 8000168 | I said I looked like a dork and she said that was true, but there was something classic about my dorkiness. I was so open and my awkwardness and embarrassment were so clear and understandable. I was extremely watchable. | Blake Nelson | ||
| 141f613 | This is where I want to be now, alone with myself. Because I know that something has happened to me tonight, something that I'm not going to understand at first, something I need to just absorb and think about and get used to. This is going to be hard for me. I can't control this. I can't stop what it will do to me. But I want it. I want to be inside it, to feel it, forever. | Blake Nelson | ||
| 2e215a8 | Then someone within closed the door, shutting Norah out into the howling dust of the night. The clouds parted briefly to reveal the full moon's cold eye, then closed again. Wind seared over the pavilion's double roof, its voice rising to a shriek. Distantly, among the maze of walls, came the frenzied barking of hundreds of tiny dogs. As she drifted towards wakefulness, Norah could not tell whether it was the wind that she heard just at the .. | fiction mystery suspense | Barbara Hambly | |
| 6fb4515 | She barely hid a smile. "That's a wizard's answer if I ever heard one." "Meaning that mages deal in double talk?" His grin was impish. "That's one of our two occupational hazards." "And what's the other one?" He laughed. "A deplorable tendency to meddle." | Barbara Hambly | ||
| 41aa281 | There is no temptation from outside the heart. | Barbara Hambly | ||
| 1bb3abb | If the other novice wizards on the row hadn't broken into Raeshaldis's rooms, pissed on her bed and written WHORE and THIEF on the walls, she probably would have been killed on the night of the full moon. | Barbara Hambly | ||
| 2930ffa | If our highly pointed triangles of the soldier class are formidable, it may be readily inferred that far more formidable are our women. For if a soldier is a wedge, a women is a needle; being, so to speak, all point, at least at the two extremities. Add to this the power of making herself practically invisible at will, and you will perceive that a female, in Flatland, is a creature by no means to be trifled with. | Edwin A. Abbott | ||
| 23fdb1c | In a word, to comport oneself with perfect propriety in Polygonal society, one ought to be a Polygon oneself. Such at least is the painful teaching of my experience. | Edwin A. Abbott | ||
| a027ed1 | e traine questa lezione: che l'essere soddisfatti di se significa essere vili e ignoranti, e che e sempre meglio aspirare a qualcosa che essere ciecamente, e impotentemente, felici | Edwin A. Abbott | ||
| 7ef3616 | Elizabeth," Jamie began gruffly, "there is aught I would speak of with you." She lifted an eyebrow at his lordly tone. "Go ahead." "It may take me a few hours to accustom myself to these possible future ways, but that does not mean I am weak or stupid." Hours? She smiled. "I know that Jamie." "Nor does that mean I have ceased being your lord. You will obey me in all things, as always." "Of course, Jamie," she said meekly. "And should .. | Lynn Kurland | ||
| 4052f6e | Runach took the book in hand and went to look for that Bruadarian lass, who was likely having a conversation with the flora and fauna of his grandfather's garden... He just hadn't expected her to be singing. It wasn't loud singing, though he could hear it once he'd wandered the garden long enough to catch sight of her, standing beneath a flowering linden tree, holding a blossom in her hand. Runach came to a skidding halt and gaped at her. V.. | runach | Lynn Kurland | |
| 13d2346 | Sile looked momentarily stymied, then shook his head sharply. "You wont go alone." "I can't ask anyone--" "You aren't asking," Sile said firmly. "I'm insisting--" "Grandfather, nay," Runach said, stunned. "I couldn't allow it." "Allow it?" Sile repeated, looking as if the gale were readying for another good blow. "Who do you think you are, whelp, to tell me what to do?" "I believe, your Majesty," Aisling said quietly, "he's someone who love.. | Lynn Kurland | ||
| 3083cf8 | Logic might be imagined to exist independent of writing--syllogisms can be spoken as well as written--but it did not. Speech is too fleeting to allow for analysis. Logic descended from the written word, in Greece as well as India and China, where it developed independently. Logic turns the act of abstraction into a tool for determining what is true and what is false: truth can be discovered in words alone, apart from concrete experience. Lo.. | James Gleick | ||
| 0f49cea | it struck me as an operational way to define free will, in a way that allowed you to reconcile free will with determinism. The system is deterministic, but you can't say what it's going to do next. | geometry | James Gleick | |
| e695a6e | He worked for two months without pause. His functional day was twenty-two hours. He would try to go to sleep in a kind of buzz, and awaken two hours later with his thoughts exactly where he had left them. His diet was strictly coffee. (Even when healthy and at peace, Feigenbaum subsisted exclusively on the reddest possible meat, coffee, and red wine. His friends speculated that he must be getting his vitamins from cigarettes.) In the end, a.. | James Gleick | ||
| 0c5413d | Another way to speak of the anxiety is in terms of the gap between information and knowledge. A barrage of data so often fails to tell us what we need to know. Knowledge, in turn, does not guarantee enlightenment or wisdom. ( said that, too: "Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? / Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?") It is an ancient observation, but one that seemed to bear restating when information became plent.. | James Gleick | ||
| 2042b1b | Gregor Mendel's years of research with green and yellow peas showed that such a thing must exist. Colors and other traits vary depending on many factors, such as temperature and soil content, but something is preserved whole; it does not blend or diffuse; it must be quantized. Mendel had discovered the gene, though he did not name it. For him it was more an algebraic convenience than a physical entity. | James Gleick | ||
| d3f62f7 | riches have never made people great but love does it every day--we | James Gleick | ||
| 53ada93 | It had been well known for twenty years that the distribution of large and small earthquakes followed a particular mathematical pattern, precisely the same scaling pattern that seemed to govern the distribution of personal incomes in a free-market economy. | James Gleick | ||
| 3865b19 | Technology, I said before, is most powerful when it enables transitions--between linear and circular motion (the wheel), or between real and virtual space (the Internet). Science, in contrast, is most powerful when it elucidates rules of organization--laws--that act as lenses through which to view and organize the world. Technologists seek to liberate us from the constraints of our current realities through those transitions. Science define.. | Siddhartha Mukherjee | ||
| 4336edc | Monod proposed an analogy: Just as the biosphere stands above the world of nonliving matter, so an "abstract kingdom" rises above the biosphere. The denizens of this kingdom? Ideas. Ideas have retained some of the properties of organisms. Like them, they tend to perpetuate their structure and to breed; they too can fuse, recombine, segregate their content; indeed they too can evolve, and in this evolution selection must surely play an impor.. | James Gleick |