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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 4aa051d | Yeah, hey you know carbon sinks are so crucial, scrubbing CO2 out of the air may eventually turn out to be our only option, so maybe we should reverse those two clauses. Make carbon sinks come first and the climate-neutral power plants second in that paragraph." "You think?" "Yes. Definitely. Carbon sinks could be the only way that our kids, and about a thousand years' worth of kids actually, can save themselves from living in Swamp World. .. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| cfa023a | it's like in eco-economics where what you take from the system has to be balanced by what you give in to it, balanced or exceeded to create that anti-entropic surge which characterizes all creative life and especially this step across to a new world, this place that is neither nature nor culture, transformation of a planet into a world and then a home. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 724227b | It's lawmakers know better than anyone that laws are more a matter of practical compromise than any kind of moral imperative. | congress law-and-order lawmakers | Kim Stanley Robinson | |
| 6dee7ac | the space diaspora occurred as late capitalism writhed in its internal decision concerning whether to destroy Earth's biosphere or change its rules. Many argued for the destruction of the biosphere, as being the lesser of two evils | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| e139ba0 | This was perhaps the evolutionary usefulness of the elderly, Bao had concluded: to give the young some kind of psychic shield from reality, putting them under a description which allowed them to ignore the fact that age and death would come to them too, and could come early and out of sequence. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| fc62633 | The vaunted experience of age was perhaps only a matter of wounds and scarring -- that young minds to old minds might be as young bodies to old bodies: stronger, more vital, less twisted by damage. | vitality wisdom youth | Kim Stanley Robinson | |
| 6538ddb | No one cares about books, that's why you can write anything you want in them. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 51f34fe | We think now that love is a kind of giving of attention. It is usually attention given to some other consciousness, but not always; the attention can be to something unconscious, even inanimate. But the attention seems often to be called out by a fellow consciousness. Something about it compels attention, and rewards attention. That attention is what we call love. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 5c0987d | The outdoors is what you must pass through in order to get from your apartment into a taxicab. said Fran Lebowitz | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 9b5d8c3 | Maybe this was the way it had always happened, with no fate ever involved; you simply fell in with the people around you, and no matter what else happened in history or the great world, for the individual it was always a matter of local acquaintances--the village, the platoon, the work unit, the monastery or madressa, the zawiyya or farm or apartment block, or ship, or neighborhood--these formed the true circumference of one's world, some t.. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 276e80a | All the great moments of history have taken place inside people's heads. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| e12add2 | people six hundred years later are still complaining about violence inflicted on their ancestors." "I think you will find that in most of those cases, there are fresh or current problems that are being given some kind of historical reinforcement or ratification. If any of these resentful populations were prospering, the distant past would only be history. People only invoke history to ballast their arguments in the present." "Maybe so. But .. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 906bfce | The one who tells the stories rules the world. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| ec46570 | But to say self-interest is all that exists, or that it should be given free rein! My Lord. Believe that and nothing matters but money. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 8c5b36f | Self-reliance my ass. We're fucking monkeys. It's always about teamwork. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 699a0b1 | knowing too that [the sky] was just a kind of rainbow made it glorious. A rainbow that was blue everywhere and covered everything. | beauty-in-nature sky | Kim Stanley Robinson | |
| 039c0ad | Charlotte was coming to believe that arrogance was a quality not just correlated with but a manifestation of stupidity, a result of stupidity. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 79ee43e | I hate politics. It's the lowest act a human being can sink to. | Richard Kadrey | ||
| 98a1eaf | He had seen the insides of jaggedly ripped-open dead people. He knew, for instance, what brains looked like spilling out of somebody's head. In the context of this, much of what went on in normal life seemed wholly and disturbingly ridiculous. | David Guterson | ||
| 693a26f | The whites, you see, are tempted by their egos and have no means to resist. We Japanese, on the other hand, know our egos are nothing. We bend our egos, all of the time, and that is where we differ. That is the fundamental difference, Hatsue. We bend our heads, we bow and are silent, because we understand that by ourselves, alone, we are nothing at all, dust in a strong wind, while the hakujin believes his aloneness is everything, his separ.. | David Guterson | ||
| 6c24aeb | The river of his youth had been diverted and poured out broadly across the land to seep through dirt to the roots of crops instead of running in its bed. The river was no longer a river, and the desert was no longer a desert. Nothing was as it had been. He knew what had happened to the sagelands. He himself had helped burn them. Then men like his father had seized the river without a trace of evil in their hearts, sure of themselves but ig.. | David Guterson | ||
| 0cafc60 | Satellites can see your thoughts, but not through rock,' is like something they might say. In John William's case, it was conscious hyperbole and therefore commentary. At one level, it was reefer-inspired. It was partly for fun. It was other things, too-but not derangement. I give no credence to the interpretation, and I knew him better than anybody. | David Guterson | ||
| 20dd3c7 | Let me tell you, having cancer sucks, but being broke and having cancer is the shittiest fate that can land on a human being. | Richard Kadrey | ||
| 153ec94 | All are equal in the grave. | Richard Kadrey | ||
| a1e45f1 | Solo el individuo que vive en soledad es una criatura sujeta a leyes profundas y si sale al empezar la manana, o mira hacia la tarde que esta vibrante de vida y comprende lo que le rodea, entonces todo se desprende de el, como si de un cadaver se tratara, aunque siga en la plenitud de la vida. | vida | Douglas Coupland | |
| 72d0130 | It's what makes us different from every other creature in the world - we have time. And we have choices | Douglas Coupland | ||
| 1f2f09a | John watched the pale black road, and he remembered a single moment during his time away in the wilderness. He wished he had told Doris about it-a single moment in Needles, California, months and months ago, facing west in the late afternoon. There had been a heavy rainstorm over just a small, localized patch of the desert, and from the patch beside it, a dust storm blew in. The sun caught the dust and the moisture in a way John had never s.. | Douglas Coupland | ||
| fc35c1a | In the spirit of Ethan's neurosis, we made a drywall list of keyboard buttons we would like to see: PLEASE, THANK YOU, FUCK OFF, DIE, OOPS...MY MISTAKE, DO SOMETHING COOL AND SURPRISE ME . | lists | Douglas Coupland | |
| c033f70 | These were citizens who, never having bothered to awaken to the technological and psychic changes in their world, hadn't bothered to defend themselves, hadn't bothered to build walls or plan counterattacks or build weapons-- asleep inside their collective dream, thinking for all the world that the unthinkable would never happen. Thinking they were safe. | Douglas Coupland | ||
| cc82764 | Ho fatto delle cazzate e delle cose buone nella vita, ma tutto e svanito da se, ed eticamente credo di essere una persona abbastanza ordinaria, uno come gli altri. Le tue Giovanna d'Arco e i tuoi Superman non si vedono speso in giro. Il mondo e fatto perlopiu di quelli come me, che arrancano. Ecco cosa fa la gente - arranca, arranca, arranca. Anche se venire a patti con il fatto che sono come tutti gli altri mi deprime, il dolore e alleviat.. | isbn-edizioni | Douglas Coupland | |
| 889ab36 | In Canada, when we speak of water, we're speaking of ourselves. Canadians are known to be unextravagant, and one explanation of this might be that we know that wasted water means a diminished collective soul; polluted waters mean a sickened soul. Water is the basis of our self-identity, and when we dream of canoes and thunderstorms and streams and even snowballs, we're dreaming about our innermost selves. | canadian water | Douglas Coupland | |
| bb5a5fd | Look, Neal, Hawaii is not some magical pixie wonderland; it's an American state populated by atomic weapons, a remnant native population and people too stupid to spell their way out of a paper bag. Most of them came here to escape pathetic lives in the forty nine other states, so in some sense, Hawaii is a scenic cul-de-sac filled with people who want to drink themselves to death without feeling judged. | humor ugly-truths | Douglas Coupland | |
| 05bbdc4 | Those were big years, big times. | Douglas Coupland | ||
| 6e17afe | Always keep your mouth shut with a drunk. You can never win with piss tanks. The most you can hope for is to break even. | Douglas Coupland | ||
| 234502c | the universe is indeed a beautiful place. If you doubt me, go check for yourself. | Douglas Coupland | ||
| 0e111a3 | The Internet has made me very casual with a level of omniscience that was unthinkable a decade ago. I now wonder if God gets bored knowing the answer to everything. | Douglas Coupland | ||
| ae8f717 | But that's what family members are for. We crave them and need them not because we have so many shared experiences to talk about but because they know precisely which subjects to avoid. | Douglas Coupland | ||
| a3a8fb4 | Six silent people in a room got me to thinking about the voice we hear in our heads when we read, the universal narrator's voice you may well be hearing right now. Whose voice *is* it you're hearing? It's not your own, is it? I didn't think so. It never is. So I posed the question out loud..." "...When you read a book, whose voice is it you hear inside your head?" | generation-a narrator universal | Douglas Coupland | |
| dcc59e4 | When you get an e-mail and reply to the sender, you simply obliterate everything they sent you and then, in small square brackets, write: [deletia] It stands for everything that's been lost. | Douglas Coupland | ||
| 4b2d99f | But if you accept dreams, you also have to accept nightmares, and I know nightmares are bad things. And if dreams are so special, why is it that no person or company has ever tried to make a drug that leads to better dreaming? Sleeping pills, yes, but dreaming pills? Have scientists even asked that question? | Douglas Coupland | ||
| d73ae64 | It hit him that his own form of loneliness was a luxury, one as chosen and as paid for as three weeks in Kenya's velds or a cherry red Ferrari. Real loneliness wasn't something an assistant scoped out and got a good price on. Real loneliness was smothering and it stank of hopelessness. | Douglas Coupland | ||
| f72bbf0 | How cruel that mankind was forced to conform to the global electronic experience. But all other options had vanished. There no longer existed a country to escape to ("country"--also, what a quaint notion) where people read books and had lives that became stories." | Douglas Coupland | ||
| c3ac1e3 | I once read that for every person currently alive on earth, there are nineteen dead people who have lived before us. That's not that much really. Our existence as a species on earth has been so short. We forget that. | Douglas Coupland | ||
| b1271f6 | I have always noticed in high school yearbooks the similarity of all the graduate write-ups--how, after only a few pages, the identities of all the unsullied young faces blur, how one person melts into another and another: At what point in our lives do we stop blurring? When do we become crisp individuals? What must we do in order to end these fuzzy identities--to clarify just who it is we really are? | Douglas Coupland |