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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 8896199 | what the hell is 'emotional bonding,' anyway? It sounds like something out of Fifty Shades of Grey. | Connie Willis | ||
| 36b188c | She was afraid she'd have no hope at all of recognizing the drop without the wagon and boxes there. She would have to get Gawyn to show it to her, | Connie Willis | ||
| e59bf90 | Which one's in the main theater?" "I don't know. I just work here part-time to pay for my organic breathing lessons." "Do you have any dice?" I asked, and then realized I was going about this all wrong. This was quantum theory not Newtonian. It didn't matter which theater I chose or which seat I sat down in. This was a delayed-choice experiment and David was already in flight." | Connie Willis | ||
| 5b964e3 | History was full of divergence points nobody could get anywhere near--from Archduke Ferdinand's assassination to the battle of Trafalgar. Events so critical and so volatile that the introduction of a single variable--such as a time traveler--could change the outcome. And alter the entire course of history. | Connie Willis | ||
| bb7e809 | Show tunes are great. Stephen Sondheim. Rodgers and Hammerstein. Wicked. Rent. The Music Man. Almost any musical will do. Except Cats." "Why? Doesn't it shut out the voices?" "No, it shuts them out fine. But it's a terrible musical." | Connie Willis | ||
| 2909479 | Brunelleschi's successor as a theorist of linear perspective was another of the towering Renaissance polymaths, Leon Battista Alberti (1404 -1472), who refined many of Brunelleschi's experiments and extended his discoveries about perspective. An artist, architect, engineer, and writer, Alberti was like Leonardo in many ways: both were illegitimate sons of prosperous fathers, athletic and good-looking, never-married, and fascinated by everyt.. | Walter Isaacson | ||
| 02561e8 | We learn that the lowly footnote is not really a lowly paratext in Anthony Grafton's The Footnote; A Curious History and Chuck Zerby's The Devil's Details: A History of Footnotes. | Pradeep Sebastian | ||
| 85ca017 | But wait--was that not how the world at large had come to think of the ocean as a whole? Wasn't the ocean just distance for most people these days? Didn't we all now take for granted a body of water that, so relatively recently--no more than five hundred years before, at most--was viewed by mariners who had not yet dared attempt to cross it with a mixture of awe, terror, and amazement? Had not a sea that had once seemed an impassable barrie.. | Simon Winchester | ||
| a530f15 | The citizens of Buffalo, then a smallish lakeside town, embarked on a brief campaign, led by a local judge named Wilkeson, to clear their own eponymous riverway and so tempt the canal engineers to route the Erie Canal to a terminus nearby. Energetic lobbying, together with the clearance of the creek, evidently worked, for the engineers did eventually end their labors there, and the fact that more than a million people now still brave one of.. | Simon Winchester | ||
| 37ade55 | individual can fully exercise his or her abilities and skills. "We shall distribute the company's surplus earnings to all employees in an appropriate manner, and we shall assist them in a practical manner to secure a stable life. In return, all employees shall exert their utmost effort into their job." Finally, his new company would help his country. Its formally stated national intent was to help "reconstruct Japan, and to elevate the nati.. | Simon Winchester | ||
| 5057050 | The northeast trade winds that blow at a steady fifteen knots onto the cliffs and reefs of the islands' lee shores produce endless trains of eminently glidable waves. | Simon Winchester | ||
| b9da64e | Voyages from Montreal to the Frozen and Pacific Ocean had been written by a Scottish fur trader, from Stornoway in the Scottish Outer Hebrides, named Alexander Mackenzie. Or more accurately, Sir Alexander Mackenzie--since King George III had awarded him a knighthood for becoming the first white man ever to cross the entirety of North America. Mackenzie had completed his voyage almost nine years earlier. He suspected that his seven-month ove.. | Simon Winchester | ||
| bbd8941 | I am a nobody. ... Treat me as a solar myth, or an echo, or an irrational quantity, or ignore me altogether. | Simon Winchester | ||
| e13d27e | The scientific world of the time was in the midst of a terrible ferment, with discoveries and realizations coming at an unseemly rate. To many in the ranks of the conservative and the devout, the new theories of geology and biology were delivering a series of hammer blows to mankind's self-regard. Geologists in particular seemed to have gone berserk, to have thrown off all sense of proper obeisance to their Maker... Mankind, it seemed, was .. | geography geology god science volcanism volcano | Simon Winchester | |
| e75aca8 | The first vehicle was an unmanned two-ton, hundred-thousand-dollar steel-caged contraption named ANGUS (for Acoustically Navigated Geophysical Underwater System), which had powerful strobe lights, a collection of thermometers, and, most critically, high-definition cameras. Late | Simon Winchester | ||
| 86a48ea | It was an idea consonant with Trench's underlying thought, that any grand new dictionary ought to be itself a democratic product, a book that demonstrated the primacy of individual freedoms, of the notion that one could use words freely, as one liked, without hard and fast rules of lexical conduct. | Simon Winchester | ||
| ce45b83 | And that was about all that he really wished the world to know about himself. "I am a nobody," he would write toward the end of the century, when fame had begun to creep up on him. "Treat me as a solar myth, or an echo, or an irrational quantity, or ignore me altogether." But" | Simon Winchester | ||
| 7726b70 | The basin of the Mississippi encompasses a good two thirds of the contiguous forty-eight states, thirty-one of which--together with two Canadian provinces--contribute waters to its flow. | Simon Winchester | ||
| cc9460e | Another party, who took an iron boat named the Explorer into the Black Canyon of the lower Colorado River, came across an Indian of what they considered such staggering ugliness that one of their number, a German visitor attached to the party, voted to kill him, pickle him in alcohol as a zoological specimen, and take him back to New York for forensic inspection. The proposal was rejected, however, and the hapless man lived. | Simon Winchester | ||
| 8746ced | These were the soldiers of the Second Brigade--the Irish Brigade--and they were braver and rougher than almost any other unit in the entire Federal army. "When anything absurd, forlorn, or desperate was to be attempted," as one English war correspondent wrote, "the Irish Brigade was called upon." The" | Simon Winchester | ||
| e94398f | Shakespeare was not even able to perform a function that we consider today as perfectly normal and ordinary a function as reading itself. He could not, as the saying goes, "look something up." Indeed the very phrase--when it is used in the sense of "searching for something in a dictionary or encyclopedia or other book of reference"--simply did not exist. It does not appear in the English language, in fact, until as late as 1692, when an Oxf.. | Simon Winchester | ||
| 9e95221 | He was mad, and for that, we have reason to be glad. A truly savage irony, on which it is discomforting to dwell. | madness | Simon Winchester | |
| 36a661c | The only public memorials ever raised to the two most tragically linked of this saga's protagonists are miserable, niggardly affairs. William Minor has just a simple little gravestone in a New Haven cemetery, hemmed in between litter and slums. George Merrett has for years had nothing at all, except for a patch of grayish grass in a sprawling graveyard in South London. Minor does, however, have the advantage of the great dictionary, which s.. | Simon Winchester | ||
| e55de4a | We will never make it under our own stem. Having made this connection, Augustine falls apart. What he describes at this point in the "Confessions" is a full-scale emotional breakdown." | Thomas Cahill | ||
| c28aec4 | Call them the people of the Dark Ages if you will, but do not underestimate the desire of these early medieval men and women for the rule of law. | Thomas Cahill | ||
| 1573c72 | Within his lifetime or soon after his death, the Irish slave trade came to a halt, and other forms of violence, such as murder and intertribal warfare, decreased. In reforming Irish sexual mores, he was rather less successful, though he established indigenous monasteries and convents, whose inmates by their way of life reminded the Irish that the virtues of lifelong faithfulness, courage, and generosity were actually attainable by ordinary .. | Thomas Cahill | ||
| 3c0b129 | Rome fell because of inner weakness, either social or spiritual; or Rome fell because of outer pressure--the barbarian hordes. What we can say with confidence is that Rome fell gradually and that Romans for many decades scarcely noticed what was happening. | Thomas Cahill | ||
| 72b7ac9 | The citizens of the City of Rome, therefore, could not believe it when toward the end of the first decade of the fifth century, they woke to find Alaric, king of the Visigoths, and all his forces parked at their gates. He might as well have been the king of the Fuzzy-Wuzzies, or any other of the inconsequential outlanders that civilized people have looked down their noses at throughout history. It was preposterous. They dispatched a pair of.. | Thomas Cahill | ||
| 02897bf | Well, they may not be civilized, but they are certainly confident--and this confidence is one of the open-handed pleasures of early Irish literature. | Thomas Cahill | ||
| bc91ad3 | This is a game that has been played over and over--in fact, for twenty-four centuries--before audiences of almost infinite variety. At some point long ago, the game became a doubles match, for the two Greek philosophers were joined by two medieval Christian theologians: Plato by Augustine of Hippo, who could nearly equal him in style and seriousness; Aristotle by Thomas Aquinas, nearly as styleless as Aristotle but, though overweight, ungai.. | Thomas Cahill | ||
| be83ec0 | Like the Jews before them, the Irish enshrined literacy as their central religious act. | irish literacy religious-act | Thomas Cahill | |
| fa0c262 | It is always revealing to see how a person responds to those situations where he's told: "There's nothing you can do about it. This is the way of the world." Peter Thiel's friend, the mathematician and economist Eric Weinstein, has a category of individual he defines as a "high-agency person." How do you respond when told something is impossible? Is that the end of the conversation or the start of one? What's the reaction to being told you .. | Ryan Holiday | ||
| 91407dc | But it is also true that this long-winded, unwieldy compilation of assorted prescriptions represents an overall softening--a humanizing--of the common law of the ancient Middle East, which easily prescribed a hand not for a hand but for the theft of a loaf of bread or for the striking of one's better and which gave much favor to the rights of the nobility and virtually none to the lower classes. The casual cruelty of other ancient law codes.. | Thomas Cahill | ||
| 917b0d6 | This was why sudden death was so feared: it did not give you time to put your spiritual house in order. You might have meant to repent but hadn't quite got round to it. Too bad. Down you go. All the way. | Thomas Cahill | ||
| a727444 | Jesus was no ivory-tower philosopher but a down-to-earth man who understood that much of the good of human life is to be found in taste, touch, smell, and the small attentions of one human being for another. | Thomas Cahill | ||
| a608027 | Someone once said that one measure of sentience was how much energy a sophont spent on matters other than survival. Fiben | David Brin | ||
| 2270fd5 | Of course we can establish constitutional checks and balances, but those won't mean a thing unless citizens make sure the safeguards are taken seriously. The greedy and the power-hungry will always look for ways to break the rules, or twist them to their advantage. | David Brin | ||
| 11936c9 | Science gives man what he needs, but magic gives man what he wants. | David Brin | ||
| 3882fc3 | The conflict is an old one. George Washington and other followers of the Enlightenment Movement wrote of their belief in an imminent maturity of humankind. The ancient and cruel feudal ways were splitting asunder at last; therefore, how could truth and freedom not prevail? In fact, the Enlightenment changed humanity forever. Yet its followers forgot something important -- that each generation is invaded by a new wave of barbarians... its ch.. | David Brin | ||
| 8ea2521 | A new legend swept Oregon, from Roseburg all the way north to the Columbia, from the mountains to the sea. It traveled by letter and by word of mouth, growing with each telling. It was a sadder story than the two that had come before it--those speaking of a wise, benevolent machine and of a reborn nation. It was more disturbing than those. And yet this new fable had one important element its predecessors lacked. It was true. The story to.. | David Brin | ||
| 60efebf | Blatant idiocies had been tried by early men and women--foolishness that would never have been considered by species aware of the laws of nature. Desperate superstitions had bred during the savage centuries. Styles of government, intrigues, philosophies were tested with abandon. It was almost as if Orphan Earth had been a planetary laboratory, upon which a series of senseless and bizarre experiments were tried. Illogical and shameful as the.. | David Brin | ||
| e75a934 | I regret having been the bearer of ambiguous tidings. | David Brin | ||
| 4572037 | As simple an act as reading or writing a sentence must be surrounded by perceptory nap and weave . . . an itch, a stray memory from childhood, the distant sound of a barking dog, or something left over from the lunch that is found caught between the teeth. | David Brin | ||
| d780c11 | Magic and art arise from an egomaniac's insistence that the artist is right, and the universe wrong. | David Brin |