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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| bc1f325 | We can live any way we want. People take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience--even of silence--by choice. The thing is to stalk your calling in a certain skilled and supple way, to locate the most tender and live spot and plug into that pulse. This is yielding, not fighting. A weasel doesn't "attack" anything; a weasel lives as he's meant to, yielding at every moment to the perfect freedom of single necessity." | Annie Dillard | ||
| ee83e05 | The remarkable thing about the world of insects, however, is precisely that there is no veil cast over these horrors. These are mysteries performed in broad daylight before our very eyes; we can see every detail, and yet they are still mysteries. If, as Heraclitus suggests, god, like an oracle, neither "declares nor hides, but sets forth by signs," then clearly I had better be scrying the signs. The earth devotes an overwhelming proportion .. | consciousness energy insects mindfulness mystery nature philosophy signs spirit wonder | Annie Dillard | |
| 551663e | How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order--willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeb.. | Annie Dillard | ||
| bf86633 | This is a spendthrift economy; though nothing is lost, all is spent. | profligacy | Annie Dillard | |
| 5df4bd7 | You are a Seminole alligator wrestler. Half naked, with your two bare hands, you hold and fight a sentence's head while its tail tries to knock you over. | Annie Dillard | ||
| b488979 | All at once, something wonderful happened, although at first, it seemed perfectly ordinary. A female goldfinch suddenly hove into view. She lighted weightlessly on the head of a bankside purple thistle and began emptying the seedcase, sowing the air with down. The lighted frame of my window filled. The down rose and spread in all directions, wafting over the dam's waterfall and wavering between the tulip trunks and into the meadow. It vaul.. | 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 | |
| 8fa0f2b | What geomancy reads what the windblown sand writes on the desert rock? I read there that all things live by a generous power and dance to a mighty tune; or I read there all things are scattered and hurled, that our every arabesque and grand jete is a frantic variation on our one free fall. | Annie Dillard | ||
| d90ee72 | It looked as though the leaves of the autumn forest had taken flight, and were pouring down the valley like a waterfall, like a tidal wave, all the leaves of the hardwoods from here to Hudson's Bay. It was as if the season's colors were draining away like lifeblood, as if the year were molting and shedding. The year was rolling down, and a vital curve had been reached, the tilt that gives way to headlong rush. And when the monarch butterfli.. | 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 | |
| e10680f | Today is the winter solstice. The planet tilts just so to its star, lists and holds circling in a fixed tension between veering and longing, and spins helpless, exalted, in and out of that fleet blazing touch. Last night Orion vaulted and spread all over the sky, pagan and lunatic, his shoulder and knee on fire, his sword three suns at the ready-for what? I won't see this year again, not again so innocent; and longing wrapped round my thr.. | 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 longing 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 | |
| d25c102 | I was standing lost, sunk, my hands in my pockets, gazing toward Tinker Mountain and feeling the earth reel down. All at once, I saw what looked like a Martian spaceship whirling towards me in the air. It flashed borrowed light like a propeller. Its forward motion greatly outran its fall. As I watched, transfixed, it rose, just before it would have touched a thistle, and hovered pirouetting in one spot, then twirled on and finally came to r.. | Annie Dillard | ||
| 6e581a6 | It isn't that as time goes by you're learning sorcery; rather, what you're learning is to save energy. And this energy will enable you to handle some of the energy fields that are not employed in perceiving the ordinary world we know. Sorcery is a state of awareness. | energy freedom intent nagualism sorcery | Carlos Castaneda | |
| 0ccffb8 | I don't know what it is about fecundity that so appalls. I suppose it is the teeming evidence that birth and growth, which we value, are ubiquitous and blind, that life itself is so astonshingly cheap, that nature is as careless as it is bountiful, and that with extravagence goes a crushing waste that will one day include our own cheap lives, Henle's loops and all. Every glistening egg is a memento mori. | Annie Dillard | ||
| 7b6ec16 | Outside shadows are blue, I read, because they are lighted by the blue sky and not the yellow sun. Their blueness bespeaks infinitesimal particles scattered down inestimable distance. | Annie Dillard | ||
| 9da4d3d | When we lose our innocence - when we start feeling the weight of the atmosphere and learn that there's death in the pot - we take leave of our sense. | innocence | Annie Dillard | |
| a1a17d8 | What do we ever know that is higher than that power which, from time to time, seizes our lives, and reveals us startlingly to ourselves as creatures set down here bewildered? Why does death so catch us by surprise, and why love? We still and always want waking. We should amass half dressed in long lines like tribesmen and shake gourds at each other, to wake up; instead we watch television and miss the show. | Annie Dillard | ||
| 717dcd5 | I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as with a dying friend. During visiting hours, I enter its room with dread and sympathy for its many disorders. I hold its hand and hope it will get better. This tender relationship can change in a twinkling. If you skip a visit or two, a work in progress will turn on you. | the-literary-process the-writing-life the-writing-process write writer writing | Annie Dillard | |
| 920ec8f | For every twenty-four hours awake, Belenky told me, people lose 25 percent of their capacity for useful mental work. | Mary Roach | ||
| 6657845 | Natick Labs and precursor the Quartermaster Subsistence Research Laboratory have extended shelf lives to near immortality. They currently make a sandwich that keeps for three years. | Mary Roach | ||
| cdeac7c | At an Italian deli counter, a whiff of butyric acid reads as parmesan cheese; elsewhere, vomit. | Mary Roach | ||
| 5a137cc | My est' svetiashchiesia sushchestva. My - vosprinimateli. My - osoznanie. My - ne predmety, my ne imeem tverdosti, my bezgranichny. Mir predmetov i tverdosti - eto tol'ko sposob sdelat' legkim nash prokhod po zemle. Eto tol'ko opisanie, kotoroe my sozdali, chtoby ono pomogalo nam. My, ili vernee nash razum zabyvaet, chto opisanie eto tol'ko opisanie i takim obrazom my zakliuchaem tselostnost' nas samikh v zakoldovannyi krug, iz kotorogo my .. | Carlos Castaneda | ||
| 46ee1e2 | While he attends to his rats, Persinger gives me the lowdown on the haunt theory. Why would a certain type of electromagnetic field make one hear things or sense a presence? What's the mechanism? The answer hinges on the fact that exposure to electromagnetic fields lowers melatonin levels. Melatonin, he explains, is an anti-convulsive; if you have less of it in your system, your brain --in particular, your right temporal lobe-- will be more.. | hallucinations paranormal science | Mary Roach | |
| 6e9366c | Capacity to Tolerate Boredom and Low Levels of Stimulation" is one of the recommended attributes on a Space Shuttle-era document drafted by the NASA In-House Working Group on Psychiatric and Psychological Selection of Astronauts." | Mary Roach | ||
| 90208a7 | Penguins can shut down digestion by lowering the temperature inside their stomach to the point where the gastric juices are no longer active. The stomach becomes a kind of cooler to carry home the fish they've caught for their young. Penguins' hunting grounds may be several days' journey from the nest. Without this handy refrigerated mode, the swallowed fish would be completely digested by the time the adults get back--"like" | Mary Roach | ||
| 9b74f88 | Silletti and I, for instance, chewed out cotton wads for the same amount of time. I produced .78 milliliters of stimulated saliva; she produced 1.4. She tried to reassure me. "It doesn't say anything about how good you are or how good I am with saliva." "Erika, I'm a dried up husk." "Don't say that, Mary." | erika-silletti popular-science saliva | Mary Roach | |
| 4c8a242 | many space psychology experiments these days focus on ways to detect stress or depression in a person who doesn't intend to tell you about it. | Mary Roach | ||
| 9ac2557 | Dr. Grime carries a Tide stain pen. He does not use his own spit. Art conservators do. "We make cotton swabs on bamboo sticks and moisten the swab in our mouths," says Andrea Chevalier, senior paintings conservator with the Intermuseum Conservation Association." | Mary Roach | ||
| 0c0aaf6 | Teleclitoridienne means simply "female of the distant clitoris," but it had a lovely, aristocratic ring to it--calling to mind a career woman in heels and sweater set, cabling reports from her home in Biarritz. At the very least, it had a nicer ring to it than "frigid." | Mary Roach | ||
| 8a50194 | Moeller, who has tasted a naked Cheeto, likens it to a piece of unsweetened puffed corn cereal | humor | Mary Roach | |
| 86aef0c | The human liver is a boss-looking organ. | Mary Roach | ||
| 8d7003d | Frequent bowel movements were associated with an increased risk of rectal cancer in men, and constipation was associated with a decreased risk." Mike Jones wasn't surprised. The medical community was never completely on board Burkitt's fiber train." | Mary Roach | ||
| 83204d4 | Pearsall is not a doctor, or not, at least, one of the medical variety. He is a doctor of the variety that gets a Ph.D. and attaches it to his name on self-help book covers. | Mary Roach | ||
| d72fa60 | For the more you know about how dead bodies decay--the biological and chemical phases they go through, how long each phase lasts, how the environment affects these phases--the better equipped you are to figure out when any given body died: in other words, the day and even the approximate time of day it was murdered. The police are pretty good at pinpointing approximate time of death in recently dispatched bodies. The potassium level of the .. | Mary Roach | ||
| 11f20e8 | The Babylonians were the original liver guys, believing the organ to be the source of human emotion and spirit. The Mesopotamians played both sides of the argument, assigning emotion to the liver and intellect to the heart. These guys clearly marched to the beat of a freethinking drummer, for they assigned a further portion of the soul (cunning) to the stomach. Similar freethinkers throughout history have included Descartes, who wrote that .. | Mary Roach | ||
| 8e71ed9 | by letter in Morse code. Kittinger says it was a joke, but Simons didn't take it that way. (Morse code has always been a tough medium for humor.) In his memoir Man High, Simons recalls thinking that "the weird and little understood breakaway phenomenon could be taking hold of Kittinger's mind,...that he...was gripped in this strange reverie and was hellbent on flying on and on without regard for the consequences." Simons compared the breaka.. | Mary Roach | ||
| ca1480d | You don't have to step on a body to carry the smells of death with you on your shoes. For reasons we have just seen, the soil around a corpse is sodden with the liquids of human decay. By analyzing the chemicals in this soil, people like Arpad can tell if a body has been moved from where it decayed. If the unique volatile fatty acids and compounds of human decay aren't there, the body didn't decompose there. | Mary Roach | ||
| 751b59c | You are perhaps wondering, as I did, why they don't use crash test dummies. This is the other side of the equation. A dummy can tell you how much force a crash is unleashing on various dummy body parts, but without knowing how much of a blow a real body part can take, the information is useless. | Mary Roach | ||
| fe39d70 | And ever since, the U.S. Army has gone confidently into battle, knowing that when cows attack, their men will be ready. | Mary Roach | ||
| 13beec9 | FROM TIME TO TIME, there was talk among the astronauts that it might be nice to have a drink with dinner. Beer is a no-fly, because without gravity, carbonation bubbles don't rise to the surface. "You just get a foamy froth," says Bourland. He says Coke spent $450,000 developing a zero-gravity dispenser, only to be undone by biology. Since bubbles also don't rise to the top of a stomach, the astronauts had trouble burping. "Often a burp is .. | Mary Roach | ||
| 1f8b5c9 | heterosexuals failed to grasp that if you lost yourself in the tease--in the pleasure and power of turning someone on--that that could be as arousing as being teased and turned on oneself. | Mary Roach | ||
| 1f79074 | As on Earth, weight-bearing exercise is the best way to hang on to your bone. In zero gravity, of course, you have to create your weight. | Mary Roach | ||
| dccac45 | Stanford University suggests that a two-year mission to Mars would have about the same effect on one's skeleton. Would an astronaut returning from Mars run the risk of stepping out of the capsule into Earth gravity and snapping a bone? | Mary Roach | ||
| de26e7b | As brain cells die from oxygen starvation, euphoria sets in, and one last, grand erection.) Space | Mary Roach | ||
| bc54f45 | Pretty much any amino acid arrangement can be hydrolyzed, including those of the recyclable that dares not speak its name. A four-person crew will, over the course of three years, generate somewhere in the neighborhood of a thousand pounds of feces. In the ominous words of sixties space nutritionist Emil Mrak, "The possibility of reuse must be considered." Sometime" | Mary Roach | ||
| f811ab6 | Monkeys offer an unadulterated demonstration of the power of hormones, as the females are not concerned about pregnancy or what their friends will think. | Mary Roach |