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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 891c6a6 | I Din't finish speakin' my cure 'cos Roses schnockoed my face so hard the ground dived forward an' I crashed my jaxy. | David Mitchell | ||
| 0faf3d4 | Mis'ry'n'barrassment are hungersome for blame | David Mitchell | ||
| dbc0e49 | The Icon'ry, Aunt Bees said, held Valleysmen's past an' present all t'gether | David Mitchell | ||
| 8a64ff4 | I know that don't sound senseful, but yarns 'bout Old-Un Smart an' flyin' dwellin's an' grown' babbits in bottles an' pictures zoomin' cross the Hole World ain't senseful neither but that's how it was, so storymen an' old books tell it. | David Mitchell | ||
| 0671f77 | The Ghost-Girl's lips was fixed in a bitter smile, but her creamy eyes was sad so sad but proud'n'strong too. | David Mitchell | ||
| e82fb59 | Oh, eerie'n'so beautsome'n'blue she was, my soul was achin'. | David Mitchell | ||
| aea0d53 | We din't speak much from then 'cos speakin' can be heard by spyers what you can't spy. | David Mitchell | ||
| 06051bc | Then the true true is diff'rent to the seemin' true? said I. Yay, an' it usually is, I mem'ry Meronym sain', an' that's why true true is presher'n'rarer'n diamonds | David Mitchell | ||
| de41e32 | See, I thinked, Meronym knows a lot 'bout Smart an' life but Valleysmen know more 'bout death. | David Mitchell | ||
| 6014055 | I got a six'n'six so maybe my luck was healin', so I thinked, fool o' fate what I am, yay, what we all are. | David Mitchell | ||
| 0b98b14 | Most yarnin's got a bit o' true, some yarnin's got some true, an' a few yarnin's got a lot o' true. | David Mitchell | ||
| ae9ea3d | Poor England. Too much history for its acreage. Years grow inwards here, like my toenails. | David Mitchell | ||
| 00d9fbd | I would suddenly be seized with a desire to go down to the beach for a swim. And merely to have imagined the sound of ripples at my feet, and then the smooth feel of the water on my body as I struck out, and the wonderful sensation of relief it gave, | Alistair Horne | ||
| ce8a47a | The worst mistake you can make, Kroeber taught, is to see another person through the lens of your prejudices. The second worst mistake is to think you aren't looking through the lens of your prejudices. | Paul La Farge | ||
| d2364c9 | What humanity came up with and held on to during its first three million years was a social organization that worked well for people. It didn't work well for products, for motorboats and can openers and operettas. It didn't work well for the greedy, the ruthless, and the power hungry. That's what we have, a social organization that works beautifully for products -- which just keep getting better and better every year -- but very poorly for .. | Daniel Quinn | ||
| 6b8bf7d | This is what creationists say of evolution, that it's "only" a theory, it hasn't been proved, as though this in itself is grounds for dismissal. This misrepresents the point of formulating a theory, which is to make sense of some body of evidence." | Daniel Quinn | ||
| a6641fe | No number has ever done it for us. Not a thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand. Even millions don't do it, and so every single year we pay our legislators to come up with more. But no matter how many prohibitions we come up with, they never do the trick, because no prohibited behavior has ever been eliminated by passing a law against it. Every time someone is sent to prison or executed, this is said to be "sending a message" to miscrea.. | Daniel Quinn | ||
| 1a5d339 | I prefer to think about problems the way engineers do. If a valve doesn't work, they don't say, "Well, we must have valves, so let's try two valves." If a valve doesn't work, they say, "Well, what would work?" Their rule is, if it doesn't work, don't do it more, do something else." | Daniel Quinn | ||
| 23bbfcf | A battered wife will invest all her feelings of self-worth in her battering husband. She has totally accepted her husband's valuation of her, and this is why she stays: She hopes to redeem herself in her husband's eyes--and therefore in her own. | Daniel Quinn | ||
| be50e57 | We all know what the business of government is: making and enforcing regulations. Governments approach all problems as problems of making and enforcing regulations. They reduce all problems to things about which regulations can be made and enforced. This upstart citizen was trying to propose an approach to the problem that had nothing to do with regulations, and so she was ignored--and | Daniel Quinn | ||
| fac9c29 | I find that the longer I live, the more I worry about people and the less I worry about rules. | Daniel Quinn | ||
| f4885ee | In Ishmael I articulated a living mythology that is so integral to our culture that it's never examined or even noticed by anyone. It's like the sound of blood rushing through your veins--you hear it so constantly that you don't hear it at all. | Daniel Quinn | ||
| cd92c7b | At first all was well. In fact, all was terrific. The Takers were pedaling away and the wings of their craft were flapping beautifully. They felt wonderful, exhilarated. They were experiencing the freedom of the air: freedom from restraints that bind and limit the rest of the biological community. And with that freedom came marvels--all the things you mentioned the other day: urbanization, technology, literacy, mathematics, science. "Their .. | Daniel Quinn | ||
| 6484f9d | Diversity, not uniformity, is what works. Our problem is not that people are living a bad way but rather that they're all living the same way. The earth can accommodate many people living in a voraciously wasteful and pollutive way, it just can't accommodate all of us living that way. | Daniel Quinn | ||
| e153503 | Pharaohs It took Khufu twenty-three years to build his Great Pyramid at Giza, where some eleven hundred stone blocks, each weighing about two and a half tons, had to be quarried, moved, and set in place every day during the annual building season, roughly four months long. Few commentators on these facts can resist noting that this achievement is an amazing testimonial to the pharaoh's iron control over the workers of Egypt. I submit, on th.. | compulsive purpose | Daniel Quinn | |
| 0a1c309 | No undesirable behavior has ever been eliminated by passing a law against it. | Daniel Quinn | ||
| 7dffee0 | CONTRARY TO THE COMMON ASSUMPTION , Charles Darwin did not originate the idea of evolution. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the mere fact of evolution had been around for a long time, and most thinkers of the time were perfectly content to leave it at that. The absence of a theory to explain evolutionary change didn't trouble them, wasn't experienced as a pressure, as it was by Darwin. He knew there had to be some intelligible mech.. | Daniel Quinn | ||
| cb2f6e0 | All too often the people of our culture think they're really doing something if they're out there fighting bad things and getting laws passed. Just look at what we've accomplished by outlawing drugs and waging a trillion-dollar War on Drugs! (Nothing!) | Daniel Quinn | ||
| e614089 | Is it so easy to change a cultural vision? Ease and difficulty are not the relevant measures. Here are the relevant measures: Readiness and unreadiness. If people aren't ready for it, then no power on earth can make a new idea catch on. But if people are ready for it (and I think they are), then a new idea will sweep the world like wildfire. | Daniel Quinn | ||
| d2ebf32 | No invention ever comes into being fully developed in a single step, from nothing. Ten thousand inventions had to be in place before Edison could invent the electric light-bulb. | Daniel Quinn | ||
| 7fd6f91 | We have a system that works fabulously well for products. But the one we have for people stinks. This is the lesson we've got to learn--or the human future on this planet is going to be a very bleak one indeed. | Daniel Quinn | ||
| a330d7e | For someone bent on achievement, education is a thing you get past and forget about as quickly as possible. | Daniel Quinn | ||
| b4828fc | The tribal life doesn't turn people into saints; it enables ordinary people to make a living together with a minimum of stress year after year, generation after generation. | Daniel Quinn | ||
| db39ebb | It's not MAN who is the scourge of the world, it's a single culture. One culture out of hundreds of thousands of cultures. Our culture. | spirituality | Daniel Quinn | |
| 2c10daa | The world will not be saved by old minds with new programs. If the world is saved, it will be saved by new minds--with no programs. | Daniel Quinn | ||
| 99962b0 | And this thought is a question: Why? "Why, why, why, why, why, why?" the tiger asks itself hour after hour, day after day, year after year, as it treads its endless path behind the bars of its cage. It cannot analyze the question or elaborate on it. If you were somehow able to ask the creature, "Why what?" it would be unable to answer you." | Daniel Quinn | ||
| 6f7e1c6 | One never thinks, "Oh, I'd better look for some food." Food is everywhere, and one picks it up almost absent-mindedly, as one takes a breath of air. In fact, one does not think of feeding as a distinct activity at all. Rather, it's like a delicious music that plays in the background of all activities throughout the day. In fact, feeding became feeding for me only at the zoo, where twice daily great masses of tasteless fodder were pitched in.. | Daniel Quinn | ||
| 1613b73 | People think I am being modest when I tell them I know absolutely nothing about art. But if they show me a piece of student work, I won't have the slightest idea whether it's art or even "good". What I do know is whether such things hang or stand in the houses of the rich - or in the museums where the rich allow their treasures to be seen. And when people understand this, they'll instantly agree with what I said in the first place, that I k.. | Daniel Quinn | ||
| 8c72392 | Man's place is to be the first . . . . [I]t's man's place to be the teacher of all the rest who are capable of becoming what he's become. | Daniel Quinn | ||
| f28e7ea | a tribe is nothing more than a coalition of people working together as equals to make a living. | Daniel Quinn | ||
| dcad692 | For example, children in school are never encouraged to want the material rewards of success. Success is something to be sought for its own sake, certainly not for any wealth it might bring. | Daniel Quinn | ||
| 957141b | I don't think there's any loneliness greater than the loneliness to be found in a bad marriage. In solitary confinement, everyone knows you're lonely and feels sorry for you. In a bad marriage loneliness is your darkest secret, one you dare not even share with your spouse. | Daniel Quinn | ||
| 9fc462c | Tribal people get more out of life. | Daniel Quinn | ||
| fb945ac | I pray about teeth-doesn't everyone? I don't have time to floss. You know. Hang in there, I tell them; I'll get around to it before it's too late. | Daniel Quinn |