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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 099ad33 | Shadow is the blue patch where the light doesn't hit. It is mystery itself, and mystery is the ancients' ultima Thule, the modern explorer's Point of Relative Inaccessibility, that boreal point most distant from all known lands. There the twin oceans of beauty and horror meet. The great glaciers are calving. Ice that sifted to earth as snow in the time of Christ shears from the pack with a roar and crumbles to water. It could be that our in.. | beauty belief creation curiosity disbelief energy epiphany exploration exultant faith fate fearless fire free freedom gaps god grace growth hallelujah humility illumination intricacy joy joyful joyfulness life-force light mindfulness multiplicity mystery nature philosopher-s-stone philosophy poem poet poetry power praise prayer prayers praying religion religious-diversity science seeing seeking soul spirit stalking-the-gaps the-tree-with-the-lights-in-it tolerance walking watching wonder | Annie Dillard | |
| 2e149b7 | No child on earth was ever meant to be ordinary, and you can see it in them, and they know it, too, but then the times get to them, and they wear out their brains learning what folks expect, and spend their strength trying to rise over those same folks. | Annie Dillard | ||
| 0829536 | Xerxes, I read, 'halted his unwieldy army for days that he might contemplate to his satisfaction' the beauty of a single sycamore. You are Xerxes in Persia. Your army spreads on a vast and arid peneplain...you call to you all your sad captains, and give the order to halt. You have seen the tree with the lights in it, haven't you? You must have. Xerxes buffeted on a plain, ambition drained in a puff. Your men are bewildered...there is noth.. | 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 science seeing seeking soul spirit stalking-the-gaps the-tree-with-the-lights-in-it tolerance walking watching wonder | Annie Dillard | |
| cd8d8ca | Nothing rose to plug the gap, to address what some called "ultimate concerns," unless you count the arts, the arts that lacked both epistemological methods and accountability, and that drew nutty people, or drove them nuts." | Annie Dillard | ||
| df882e5 | There is a certain age at which a child looks at you in all earnestness and delivers a long, pleased speech in all the true inflections of spoken English, but with not one recognizable syllable. There is no way you can tell the child that if language had been a melody, he had mastered it and done well, but that since it was in fact a sense, he had botched it utterly. | Annie Dillard | ||
| 5d605d5 | I never knew. I never knew as I washed, and the blood streaked, faded, and finally disappeared, whether I'd purified myself or ruined the blood sign of the passover. | Annie Dillard | ||
| 51ac18d | I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too. I am not washed and beautiful, in control of a shining world in which everything fits, but instead am wandering awed about on a splintered wreck I've come to care for, whose gnawed trees breathe a delicate air, whose bloodied and scarred creatures are my dearest companions, and whose beauty beats and shine.. | Annie Dillard | ||
| 5db9b7d | The wide days split life open like an ax. | Annie Dillard (Author) | ||
| 53d58e8 | Que es el pasado si no aquello que elegimos recordar? | Amy Tan | ||
| 42308db | I applied to be a subject in a simulated Mars mission. I made it past the first round of cuts and was told that someone from the European Space Agency would call me for a phone interview later in the month. The call came at 4:30 A.M., and I did not take care to hide my irritation. I realized later that it had probably been a test, and I had failed it. | Mary Roach | ||
| 01efea0 | A study in the journal Obesity Surgery reported no significant differences in the size of the stomachs of morbidly obese people as compared with non-obese control subjects. It is hormones and metabolism, calories consumed and calories burned, that determine one's weight, not holding capacity. | Mary Roach | ||
| 169809f | During World War II, the U.S. military was shipping so much meat overseas to feed troops and allies that a domestic shortage loomed. According to a 1943 Breeder's Gazette article, the American soldier consumed close to a pound of meat a day. Beginning that year, meat on the homefront was rationed--but only the mainstream cuts. You could have all the organ meats you wanted. The army didn't use them because they spoiled more quickly and becau.. | Mary Roach | ||
| 506d75f | By the time children are ten years old, generally speaking, they've learned to eat like the people around them. Once food prejudices are set, it is no simple task to dissolve them. In a separate study, Rozin presented sixty-eight American college students with a grasshopper snack, this time a commercially prepared honey-covered variety sold in Japan. Only 12 percent were willing to try one. So | Mary Roach | ||
| f85971e | The other problem with classroom-based efforts to change eating habits was that children don't decide what's for dinner. Mead and her team soon realized they had to get to the person they called the "gatekeeper"--Mom." | Mary Roach | ||
| f5c4590 | Solo recuerdas lo que quieres recordar. Solo sabes lo que tu corazon te permite saber. | Amy Tan | ||
| c55e6ac | To open people's minds to a new food, you sometimes just have to get them to open their mouths. Research has shown that if people try something enough times, they'll probably grow to like it. | Mary Roach | ||
| 09aed86 | SHOULD CIRCUMSTANCE PREVENT a man from carrying his cigarettes and cell phone in his pants pocket, the rectum provides a workable alternative. So workable that well over a thousand pounds of tobacco and hundreds of cell phones are rectally smuggled into California state prisons each year. The contraband allows incarcerated gang members and narcotics dealers to make business calls from behind bars (and to enjoy a smoke while doing so). | Mary Roach | ||
| 22a5d4c | On the way here, I stopped in the office of a block captain who wanted to tell me about an inmate who was caught with two boxes of staples, a pencil sharpener, sharpener blades, and three jumbo binder rings in his rectum. He became known as "OD," for Office Depot. They never found out what he intended to do with the stuff." | Mary Roach | ||
| 012ff78 | Mir astronaut Jerry Linenger writes in his memoir that he was surprised to find a bottle of cognac in one arm of his spacesuit and a bottle of whiskey in the other. (Linenger was the Frank Burns of space exploration: | Mary Roach | ||
| 6011bbc | He recovers and seems to possess all his earlier faculties, with one exception: the formerly mild-mannered Gage is now something of a hellion, an impulsive shit-starter. | Mary Roach | ||
| c158430 | You do not dress to please yourself; you dress to please others. | Mary Roach | ||
| a7d3da7 | I am not, by trade or character, a spotlight operator. I'm the goober with a flashlight, stumbling into corners and crannies, not looking for anything specific but knowing when I've found it. Courage | Mary Roach | ||
| 513d465 | It is assumed that a man will fit one of the three sizes available in the condom-style urine collection device hose attachment inside the EVA suit. To avoid mishaps caused by embarrassed astronauts opting for L when they are really S, there is no S. "There is L, XL, and XXL," | Mary Roach | ||
| 5fa74dc | Sometimes courage is nothing more than a willingness to think differently than those around you. | Mary Roach | ||
| eab08ab | Heroism doesn't always happen in a burst of glory. Sometimes small triumphs and large hearts change the course of history. Sometimes a chicken can save a man's life. ___________ | Mary Roach | ||
| b4e9396 | I think that at the moment of death that little window opens up. I think that maybe we're all connected to something bigger than we are. | Mary Roach | ||
| f196c21 | Twenty-five percent of the nurses in one study, writes Larson, had dry, damaged skin. Ironically, the nurses may be exacerbating the very thing that hand-washing seeks to prevent: the spread of infectious bacteria. Larson says healthy skin sheds 10 million particles a day, and 10 percent of those harbor bacteria. Dry, damaged skin flakes off more readily than healthy, lubricated skin and thus disperses more bacteria. Damaged skin also harbo.. | Mary Roach | ||
| d636c13 | It's hard to say where is the bigger hubris, in their convictions or in the arrogance of carrying them to a third decimal point | Mary Roach | ||
| f3417e7 | the National Research Council (NRC) hired a team of anthropologists, led by the venerable Margaret Mead, to study American food habits. How do people decide what's good to eat, and how do you go about changing their minds? Studies were undertaken, recommendations drafted, reports published--including Mead's 1943 opus "The Problem of Changing Food Habits: Report of the Committee on Food Habits," and if ever a case were to be made for word-ra.. | Mary Roach | ||
| c32eff6 | So powerful are race- and status-based disgusts that explorers have starved to death rather than eat like the locals. British polar exploration suffered heavily for its mealtime snobbery. | Mary Roach | ||
| 0019f9f | Nancy Rawson, seated across from me, is AFB's director of basic research and an expert in animal taste and smell. She volunteers that cats are more or less "monoguesic," meaning they stick to one food. Outdoor cats tend to be either mousers or birders, not both. But don't worry, as most of the difference between Tuna Treat and Poultry Platter is in the name and the picture on the label. "They may have more fish meal in one and more poultry .. | Mary Roach | ||
| d675951 | Taste, like smell, is a doorman for the digestive tract, a chemical scan for possibly dangerous (bitter, sour) elements and desirable (salty, sweet) nutrients. | Mary Roach | ||
| b8f03cf | That's what killed Elvis," said Adrianne Noe. Noe is the director of the National Museum of Health and Medicine, which has its own megacolon, from an unknown party. As we were about to get off the phone, Elvis Presley dropped into the conversation. Noe related that she'd been standing by the megacolon exhibit one day and a visitor told her that Elvis had had one too. The man added that Presley had struggled with constipation his whole life .. | Mary Roach | ||
| a72097b | I had heard that Presley died on the toilet, but I'd assumed the location was happenstance, as it was with Judy Garland and Lenny Bruce: an embarrassing setting for a standard celebrity overdose. But the straining-at-stool theory made some sense. With all three autopsies--that of J.W., Mr. K., and E., as Presley's intimates called him--the collapse was abrupt and the autopsy revealed no obvious cause of death. (Though Presley had traces of .. | Mary Roach | ||
| 401d446 | short piece headlined "Elvis Died of Constipation" had run as the site's lead story (and its middle and last story) under the category Constipation News. Why didn't the colonic inertia theory come up earlier? Nichopoulos says that at the time, he had never heard of it. Nor had the gastroenterologist who treated Presley in the 1970s. "Nobody knew about it back then," Nichopoulos says." | Mary Roach | ||
| 756d78b | I didn't realize Farrah Fawcett had died of anal cancer. There were references to her ailment as cancer "below the colon." It was like my mother, when I was a kid, calling the vagina "your bottom in front." Up through 2010, anal cancer had no nonprofit society, no one to organize fund-raisers and outreach, no colored awareness ribbon. (Even appendix cancer has a ribbon.)* Like cervical cancer, anal cancer is caused by the human papillomavir.. | Mary Roach | ||
| 65f4dd8 | I ask Nichopoulos to talk about precisely, medically, what caused Presley's death. "The night he died he was bigger than usual," he begins. Depending on how long it had been since Presley had managed to empty himself, his girth fluctuated between big and stupendous. He sometimes appeared to be gaining or losing twenty pounds from one performance to the next. "He wanted to get rid of his gut that night. He was pushing and pushing. Holding hi.. | Mary Roach | ||
| 0d4a2ce | The body's response to this wild, Valsalvic seesawing of the vital signs can throw off the electrical rhythm of the heart. The resulting arrhythmia can be fatal. This is especially likely to happen in someone, like Elvis, with a compromised heart. Fatal arrhythmia is the cause of death listed on Presley's autopsy report. | Mary Roach | ||
| b01ea74 | Making matters riskier: bed pans! "The notorious frequency of sudden and unexpected deaths of patients while using bed pans in hospitals has been commented upon for many years," wrote the Cincinnati doctors. Notorious enough for a term to be coined: "bed pan death." Lying flat is as counterproductive a posture as squatting is productive. Squatting passively increases the pressure on the rectum. It does the pushing for you. It" | Mary Roach | ||
| 1f99320 | The other mode of defecation-associated sudden death is pulmonary embolism. The surge of blood when the person relaxes can dislodge a clot in a large blood vessel | Mary Roach | ||
| 1a1cc94 | sugar itself doesn't cause cavities; it's the acidic metabolites of the bacteria that feed on the sugar. As with acidic foods, saliva dilutes the acid and brings the mouth back to a neutral pH. You | Mary Roach | ||
| eceb7fb | Could thorough chewing lower the national debt? If saliva is full of bacteria, why do animals lick their wounds? Why don't suicide bombers smuggle bombs in their rectums? Why don't stomachs digest themselves? Why is crunchy food so appealing? Can constipation kill you? Did it kill Elvis? You | Mary Roach | ||
| 86be778 | You may be wondering, though probably not, why newborns--who have no teeth to protect--produce excessive volumes of drool. Silletti has answers. One is simple mechanics. "They lack teeth to physically keep it in there." | Mary Roach | ||
| f7caa73 | Flavor is a combination of taste (sensory input from the surface of the tongue) and smell, but mostly it's the latter. Humans perceive five tastes--sweet, bitter, salty, sour, and umami (brothy)--and an almost infinite number of smells. Eighty to ninety percent of the sensory experience of eating is olfaction. | Mary Roach |