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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 4950cf3 | Scholars had known for more than fifteen hundred years that the world was large and round. Colon disputed both facts. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 241066d | Cultures are like books, the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss once remarked, each a volume in the great library of humankind. In the sixteenth century, more books were burned than ever before or since. How many Homers vanished? How many Hesiods? What great works of painting, sculpture, architecture, and music vanished or never were created? Languages, prayers, dreams, habits, and hopes--all gone. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 0faea1b | How could the colonists starve in the midst of plenty? One reason was that the English feared leaving Jamestown to fish, because Powhatan's fighters were waiting outside the colony walls. A second reason was that a startlingly large proportion of the colonists were gentlemen, a status defined by not having to perform manual labor. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 85f3a6f | Pilgrim writers universally reported that Wampanoag families were close and loving--more so than English families, some thought. Europeans in those days tended to view children as moving straight from infancy to adulthood around the age of seven, and often thereupon sent them out to work. Indian parents, by contrast, regarded the years before puberty as a time of playful development, and kept their offspring close by until marriage. (Jarrin.. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 92d3e14 | Mesoamerica would deserve its place in the human pantheon if its inhabitants had only created maize, in terms of harvest weight the world's most important crop. But the inhabitants of Mexico and northern Central America also developed tomatoes, now basic to Italian cuisine; peppers, essential to Thai and Indian food; all the world's squashes (except for a few domesticated in the United States); and many of the beans on dinner plates around .. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 855b2ac | Maize had an equivalent impact on much of the rest of the world after Columbus introduced it to Europe. Central Europeans became especially hooked on it; by the nineteenth century, maize was the daily bread of Serbia, Rumania, and Moldavia. So | Charles C. Mann | ||
| a4386d3 | Puebla shopkeepers complained that the country was fighting an invasion of counterfeits from China--a Chinese imitation of a Chinese-made Mexican imitation of a Chinese original. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 85d1672 | mistaken. The Columbian Exchange had such far-reaching effects that some biologists now say that Colon's voyages marked the beginning of a new biological era: the Homogenocene. The term refers to homogenizing: mixing unlike substances to create a uniform blend. With the Columbian Exchange, places that were once ecologically distinct have become more alike. In this sense the world has become one, exactly as the old admiral hoped. The lightho.. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| b87b3d3 | In the Amazon, the turn to swidden was unfortunate. Slash-and-burn cultivation has become one of the driving forces behind the loss of tropical forest. Although swidden does permit the forest to regrow, it is wildly inefficient and environmentally unsound. The burning sends up in smoke most of the nutrients in the vegetation--almost all of the nitrogen and half the phosphorus and potassium. At the same time, it pours huge amounts of carbon .. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 01e09ad | My brother was an asshole, and Crystal was a whore. These were facts I had to deal with. | Charlaine Harris | ||
| eff520d | Love them to death. Sookie to Pam | Charlaine Harris | ||
| 117ba1d | I would characterize Moonlit Nights as a mix between Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child's 'The Relic' and 'Congo' by Michael Crichton. If those books had a baby and that baby was a werewolf then that would be my book! | Jacob Parr | ||
| cf964e0 | The histories and tragedies of Shakespeare that Lincoln loved most dealt with themes that would resonate to a president in the midst of civil war: political intrigue, the burdens of power, the nature of ambition, the relationship of leaders to those they governed. The plays illuminated with stark beauty the dire consequences of civil strife, the evils wrought by jealousy and disloyalty, the emotions evoked by the death of a child, the sunde.. | Doris Kearns Goodwin | ||
| 698f1fe | Great sobs choked his utterance. He buried his head in his hands, and his tall frame was convulsed with emotion. I stood at the foot of the bed, my eyes full of tears, looking at the man in silent, awe-stricken wonder. His grief unnerved him, and made him a weak, passive child. I did not dream that his rugged nature could be so moved. I shall never forget those solemn moments--genius and greatness weeping over love's lost idol. | George Saunders | ||
| 834f67b | to be a witness to evil is to be human. | Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child | ||
| c00a77f | what's a tomb without a curse? | Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child | ||
| b5b8147 | He didn't exactly look kind, but he looked less detached. "He was your enemy, and now he is dead," he said. "This is cause for rejoicing." "Not exactly," I said. I didn't know how to explain. "You're a Christian," he said, as if he'd discovered I was a hermaphrodite or a fruitarian. "I'm a real bad one," I said hurriedly. His lips compressed, and I could see he was trying hard not to laugh." | Charlaine Harris | ||
| 455e81d | Sam, ha dois anos, nao fazia qualquer ideia de como era o mundo ha minha volta. Nao sabia o que tu eras. Nao sabia que existiam fadas a serio. Nao poderia ter imaginado nada disso. - Abanei a cabeca. - Que mundo este, Sam. E maravilhoso e assustador. Cada dia e diferente. Nunca pensei que teria uma vida e agora tenho. | sookie-stackhouse | Charlaine Harris | |
| 17fd0fe | Every now and then I felt like I was Bill's doll. | Charlaine Harris | ||
| 9177335 | Just what I needed, another psycho bitch after me. Hadn't the Weres pretty much cornered that market? | Charlaine Harris | ||
| dc809e3 | I thought that being faithful was about becoming someone other than who I was, in other words, and it was not until this project failed that I began to wonder if my human wholeness might be more useful to God than my exhausting goodness. | Barbara Brown Taylor | ||
| 3bff2bf | Since some people consider being human a liability, and "fully" would only make things worse, I should perhaps explain what I mean. To become fully human means learning to turn my gratitude for being alive into some concrete common good. It means growing gentler toward human weakness. It means practicing forgiveness of my and everyone else's hourly failures to live up to divine standards. It means learning to forget myself on a regular basi.. | Barbara Brown Taylor | ||
| c228d29 | Maybe that is the difference between pastoral counselors and spiritual directors. We go to counselors when we want help getting out of caves. We go to directors when we are ready to be led farther in. I | Barbara Brown Taylor | ||
| 4c7aacf | Human beings may separate things into as many piles as we wish--separating spirit from flesh, sacred from secular, church from world. But we should not be surprised when God does not recognize the distinctions we make between the two. Earth is so thick with divine possibility that it is a wonder we can walk anywhere without cracking our shins on altars. | Barbara Brown Taylor | ||
| 59d2e6a | I produced a fulsome sermon. When the appointed Sunday arrived, I used all of my best grooming skills. I picked the cat hairs off my most expensive suit, smoothed my hair, and put a Band-aid on the thumb I had chewed while working overtime on my sermon. Once I met the delegation at church I did my best to dazzle them, and after the service was over we sat for almost two hours in a Sunday School room as I answered question after question abo.. | Barbara Brown Taylor | ||
| dfe3729 | Some are questioning whether the churches they grew up in have anything to offer them as they make their ways in a culture of many cultures with many views of truth, some of which make a great deal of sense to them. For those who counted on God to protect them from so many choices, it is as if the heavenly Father let go of their hand in a crowd one day and vanished into a sea of divine possibilities. I cannot protect the students in my clas.. | Barbara Brown Taylor | ||
| c295d66 | Contrary to popular opinion, all religions are not alike. Their followers see the world in very distinct ways. Their understandings of the human condition proceed from different assumptions, leading them to propose different remedies. If I had been able to resist the wisdom they offered me - if I had been able to keep my Christian glasses on, so that I only saw what those prescription lenses allowed me to see - then I might have emerged unc.. | Barbara Brown Taylor | ||
| c75f9bf | Come to think of it, I do know one preacher who tried something like that - from the pulpit of a cathedral in a major city, no less. I do not remember what the subject of her sermon was, only the response to it. She must have suggested that the Christian way was one among many ways to God (a wave and not the ocean), because afterward a man came up to her and said, 'If God isn't partial to Christianity, then what am I doing here?' I wish or.. | Barbara Brown Taylor | ||
| 8931f68 | I have learned things in the dark that I could never have learned in the light, things that have saved my life over and over again, so that there is really only one logical conclusion. I need darkness as much as I need light. | Barbara Brown Taylor | ||
| b089538 | The wind smelled like the moon. I went up there so many times in the weeks that followed that I no longer remember which night it was that God finally answered my prayer. I do not think it was right at the beginning, when I was still saying my prayers in words. I think it came later, when I had graduated to inchoate sounds. Up on that fire escape, I learned to pray the way a wolf howls. I learned to pray the way that Ella Fitzgerald sang sc.. | Barbara Brown Taylor | ||
| ffbc324 | When religious arguments based on the perspective of a single century or culture reach a high pitch, or when people who seem to have read only excerpts of the Bible use it to propose legislation, I return to the Book - not to find a solution, but to remember how many possibilities there are. | Barbara Brown Taylor | ||
| 99530fa | It was not until I began meeting people of other faiths in their most sacred spaces that I learned how bruised some of them were by Christian evangelism. Worshippers at the Hindu Temple returned to the parking lot after one of their major festivals to find Christians by their cars with pamphlets demeaning their holiday. Muslims were used to Christians saying malicious things about the Qur'an. Native Americans were tired of being asked what .. | Barbara Brown Taylor | ||
| 1f14b6b | Ask anyone what she means when she says 'God' and chances are that you will learn a lot more about that person than you will learn about God. | Barbara Brown Taylor | ||
| cbf88a3 | As hard as I have tried to remember the exact moment when I fell in love with God, I cannot do it. My earliest memories are bathed in a kind of golden light that seemed to embrace me as surely as my mother's arms. | Barbara Brown Taylor | ||
| 40e01c8 | The most deeply one sinks into one's own religious truth,' Knitter says, 'the more broadly one can appreciate and learn from other truths.' That has been true for me, both as a teacher and as a spiritual seeker. Unlike the young man bent on keeping his Christian faith uncontested and pure, I have gained insight every time I have put mine to the test. Sometimes the results are distressing, as when I find the silence of the meditation bench .. | Barbara Brown Taylor | ||
| d5ffc06 | Pema Chodron did not become one of my teachers until I had almost finished writing, but she diagnosed the problem so well that I can no longer say it without her help. We are all so busy constructing zones of safety that keep breaking down, she says, that we hardly notice where all the suffering is coming from. We keep thinking that the problem is out there, in the things that scare us: dark nights, dark thoughts, dark guests, dark emotions.. | Barbara Brown Taylor | ||
| 34d7e57 | For reasons that will never be entirely clear, God has a soft spot for religious strangers, both as agents of divine blessing and recipients of divine grace - to the point that God sometimes chooses one of them over people who believe they should by all rights come first. This is a great mystery, but it does nothing to obscure the great commandment. In every circumstance, regardless of the outcome, the main thing Jesus has asked me to do is.. | neighbor-quotes pluralism religion respecting-others | Barbara Brown Taylor | |
| f135c23 | Later, when I stood in front of an alter waving incense, I would remember standing in front of the bar at Dante's waving cigarette smoke out of my face, and the exact same feeling of tenderness would wash over me, because the people in both places were so much alike. We were all seeking company, meaning, solace, self-forgetfulness. Whether we found those things or not, it was the seeking that led us to find each other in the cloud even when.. | darkness sacred searaching | Barbara Brown Taylor | |
| febfc3f | Dying is totally out of the question. | Allison Pearson | ||
| 16c1fff | Sharon had seen a penis, but it was her brother's so it didn't count. Carol was the only girl in our group who had touched a real one....Carol said the penis felt like eyelid skin. Could that be right? For weeks after she told us, I would brush a finger over the skin above my eye and I would marvel that something that was made of boy could be so silky and fine, like tissue paper. | Allison Pearson | ||
| a9246ab | Being your slave, what should I do but tend Upon the hours and times of your desire? I have no precious time at all to spend, Nor services to do till you require. Nor dare I question with my jealous thought Where you may be or your affairs suppose, But like a sad slave stay and think of nought Save where you are, how happy you make those. | Allison Pearson | ||
| 706456a | He does not listen for an answer, but yawns, his face opening lewdly upon regions compared with which nudity becomes a milliner's invention. | Mervyn Peake | ||
| dd54d10 | The laugh of Doctor Prunesquallor was part of his conversation and quite alarming when heard for the first time. It appeared to be out of control as though it were a part of his voice, a top-storey of his vocal range that only came into its own when the doctor laughed. There was something about it of wind whistling through high rafters and there was a good deal of the horse's whinny, with a touch of the curlew. When giving vent to it, the d.. | Mervyn Peake | ||
| 148ab99 | My passion, My queen of fire and dread; Divine amalgamation Of swedes and cooper-thread, Unstitch your irritation And kiss me when I'm dead. | Mervyn Peake |