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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| f92b776 | Giant letters march across the dome of the sky: HOME NOT FOUND. Huw, who knows Comic Sans when she sees it, winces in mild disgust. | Cory Doctorow | ||
| ddf525b | Stories become great by hacking your brain. Nothing that happens in fiction matters. The people in fiction are fictional so their triumphs and tragedies have literally no consequence. The death of the yogurt you doomed to a fiery death in your gut acid this morning is finitely more tragic than the "deaths" of Romeo and Juliet. The yogurt was alive and then it died. Romeo and Juliet never lived in the first place." | fiction storieses | Cory Doctorow | |
| 9f709b0 | Otto von Bismarck quipped, "Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made." | Cory Doctorow | ||
| 1139f57 | T]hat little voice shut up the instant I did something. And not just something: the exact thing I knew to be right. Because if the system was broken, if Carrie Johnstone wasn't going to ever pay consequences for her action, it wasn't because "the system" failed to get her. It was because people like me chose not to act when we could. The system was people, and I was part of it, part of its problems, and I was going to be part of the solutio.. | part-of-the-solution the-system | Cory Doctorow | |
| 7fc86ed | Anytime someone puts a lock on something that belongs to you and doesn't give you a key, that lock is not there for your benefit. | Cory Doctorow | ||
| 37d13f6 | Give humanity a truly unlimited field, and it would fill it with Happy Meal toys and holographic sports-star, collectible trading card game art. | Charles Stross Cory Doctorow | ||
| b861949 | We are medium-sized mammals who only prosper because we've developed a half-arsed ability to terraform the less suitable bits of the planet we evolved on, and we're conscious of our inevitable decay and death, and we can't live anywhere else. There is no invisible sky daddy to give us immortal life and a harp and wings when we die. | death humanity life religion | Charles Stross Cory Doctorow | |
| 8b0735e | What I've got here are my own constraints. I'm challenging myself, using found objects and making stuff that throws all this computational capacity at, you know, these trivial problems, like car-driving Elmo clusters and seashell toaster-robots. We have so much capacity that the trivia expands to fill it. And all that capacity is junk-capacity, it's leftovers. There's enough computational capacity in a junkyard to launch a space-program, an.. | Cory Doctorow | ||
| f1eda4e | Helpfiles are traditionally outnumbered by no-help files, which superficially resemble a helpfile in form but not in content because they don't actually tell you anything you don't already know, or they answer every question except the one you're asking, or you open them and a giant animated paper clip leaps out and cheerfully asks where you want to go today. And wikis are worse. | computers help it | Charles Stross Cory Doctorow | |
| 60f2089 | Face-book has all the social graces of a nose-picking, hyperactive six-year-old, standing at the threshold of your attention and chanting, "I know something, I know something, I know something, won't tell you what it is!" | computers facebook social-networking | Cory Doctorow | |
| 586d400 | This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright #154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin' it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don't give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that's all we wanted to do. | Cory Doctorow | ||
| e112783 | Here's a free tip," his father says: "The feds aren't terribly impressed by infantile egoism. In fact, if Objectivism were at the center of human philosophical discourse rather than the fringes, we wouldn't be here--the Big Zap would have arrived decades ago. But I'm going to be generous and let you write down the ghost of Ayn Rand as a brain fart. I won't bring her up again if you don't." | big-zap brain-fart generositys | Cory Doctorow | |
| c03f68c | I've always loved just learning stuff for its own sake. Just to be smarter about the world around me. | Cory Doctorow | ||
| eba90cd | These days, tales of what Facebook did with its users during the singularity are commonly used to scare naughty children in Wales. | singularity | Cory Doctorow | |
| ab6e9e1 | When I saw myself thus wholly cut off from human succour, incapable of attempting anything for my deliverance, I thought of heavenly succour. Memories of my childhood, of my mother...came back to me. I began to pray, little as I deserved that God should know me when I had forgotten Him so long; and I prayed fervently. | Jules Verne | ||
| 6c3ceae | Death, the beginning of eternal things, is only the end of earthly cares. -Priest | earth eternity | Jules Verne | |
| bd43369 | In the course of time, Michael Strogoff reached a high station in the Empire. But it is not the history of his success, but the history of his trials, which deserves to be related. | storytelling | Jules Verne | |
| 7111559 | Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in Russia, Hermann Olberth in Germany, and Robert Goddard in the United States all came up with an eerily similar concept for using liquid fuel to power rockets for human spaceflight. I've seen this pointed out as an odd coincidence, one of those moments when an idea inexplicably emerges in multiple places at once. But when I read through each of these three men's biographies I discovered why they all had the same ide.. | rocketry shuttle space space-program space-shuttle space-travel | Margaret Lazarus Dean | |
| 0cc01e6 | This lucid explanation of the phenomena we had witnessed appeared to me quite satisfactory. However great and mighty the marvels of nature may seem to us, they are always to be explained by physical reasons. Everything is subordinate to some great law of nature. | Jules Verne | ||
| 12651ea | why, I've just this instant found out... that we might have gone around the world in only seventy-eight days. | time | Jules Verne | |
| e348e22 | Monsieur is going to leave home?" "Yes," returned Phileas Fogg. "We are going round the world." | Jules Verne | ||
| f845df0 | May the judge disappear, and the philosopher continue the peaceful exploration of the sea! If his destiny be strange, it is also sublime. Have I not understood it myself? Have I not lived ten months of this unnatural life? And to the question asked by Ecclesiastes three thousand years ago, "That which is far off and exceeding deep, who can find it out?" two men alone of all now living have the right to give an answer---- CAPTAIN NEMO AND MY.. | Jules Verne | ||
| 5047a67 | These are just some arms in the service of a head. Is not this the true organization of the force? | Jules Verne | ||
| a11d457 | That terrible avenger, a perfect archangel of hatred. | Jules Verne | ||
| a050906 | Well, I thought I was so tranquil! I need to give up that illusion! There is decidedly no rest to be had in this world. | Jules Verne | ||
| f70c5c7 | When Jules Verne was on everyone's nightstand, Pulitzer ordered daredevil reporter Nellie Bly to travel around the world in eighty days; she accomplished it in seventy-two. | Paul Collins | ||
| d33ea05 | Are we rising again?" "No. On the contrary." "Are we descending?" "Worse than that, captain! we are falling!" "For Heaven's sake heave out the ballast!" "There! the last sack is empty!" "Does the balloon rise?" "No!" "I hear a noise like the dashing of waves. The sea is below the car! It cannot be more than 500 feet from us!" "Overboard with every weight! ... everything!" | Jules Verne | ||
| c81e7cf | Yes, forgotten by all else, but not by us. | Jules Verne | ||
| 611659f | Wait a few minutes, our lantern will be lit, and, if you like light places, you will be satisfied. | Jules Verne | ||
| 06e9cb9 | The alphabet is male and female. If you will know the correct order of letters, you make a world, you make creation. This is why they will hide the order. If you will know the combinations, you make all life and death. | Don DeLillo | ||
| d049066 | Fee-uck, man. This game is still on. I get that sixty-two yet. I get his ass and whip it into shape. Damnright. I get that shitpiss sixty-two and beat his black ass into the ground." "He's white," I said. "I know he's white. They're all white. Everybody's white. Black fucks." | Don DeLillo | ||
| 15ac20c | He was a regulator first-class, which was another term for metalworker unskilled. | soviet | Don DeLillo | |
| d6b746e | I'm not saying we shouldn't grieve. Just, why don't we put it in God's hands? she said. Why haven't we learned this, after all the evidence of all the dead? We're supposed to believe in God but then why don't we obey the laws of God's universe, which teach us how small we are and where we're all going to end up? | Don DeLillo | ||
| d1b176c | Bemoan technology all you want. It expands your self-esteem and connects you in your well-pressed suit to the things that slip through the world otherwise unperceived. | Don DeLillo | ||
| 9a55fdd | The smoke alarm went off in the hallway upstairs, either to let us know the battery had just died or because the house was on fire. We finished our lunch in silence. | Don DeLillo | ||
| 2bb7404 | Another one says she has asnap-off crotch. What do you think she means by that? I'm a little worried,though, about all these outbreaks of lifestyle diseases. I carry a reinforced ribbed condom at all times. One size fits all. But I have a feeling it's not much protection against the intelligence and adaptability of the modern virus. | Don DeLillo | ||
| f0dca52 | dialectics, as a veteran communist explained . . . 'is the art and technique of always landing on your feet. | Tony Judt | ||
| 203226e | she knows what he means, that they don't have to touch. the same thing that's happening to him is happening to her. she doesn't need to crawl under the table ans suck his dick. too tire to interest either one of them. the flow is strong between them. the emotional tone. let it express itself. he sees her in her wallow and feel his pelvic muscles begin to quiver. he say, tell me to stop and i'll stop. but he doesn't wait for her to reply. th.. | don-delillo | Don DeLillo | |
| 4767e9b | Of course you know. You're brilliant. Everyone says so." "What else can they say? I do neurochemistry. No one knows what that is." | Don DeLillo | ||
| 93c99cc | He liked to talk about the anatomy of racecars, motorcycles, hunting rifles, how things work, and she liked to listen. It was a mark of the distance between them that she listened so eagerly, the perennial miles, the weeks and months | Don DeLillo | ||
| 46a3e98 | El sexo nos descubre. El sexo nos revela como somos. Por eso es tan estremecedor. Nos despoja de toda apariencia. | Don DeLillo | ||
| c811a31 | When Lee has a certain look on his face, eyes kind of amused, mouth small and tight, he finds himself thinking of his father. He believes it is a look his father may have used. It feels like his father. A curious sensation, the look coming upon him, taking hold in an unmistakable way, and then his old man is here, eerie and forceful and whole, a meeting across worlds. | Don DeLillo | ||
| 0104943 | Is a cardigan what women wear when they don't want to talk about themselves? | Don DeLillo | ||
| d29d2a5 | A word is also a picture of a word. | Don DeLillo |