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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 041b6a0 | The idea that our unconscious possesses such sure aim excited me. I became more attuned to my own erroneously carried out actions. | Alison Bechdel | ||
| 199cbd6 | Alice Miller writes that the child who suppresses his own feelings in order to accomodate a parent has been, in a sense, abandoned. 'Later, when these feelings of being deserted begin to emerge in the analysis of the adult, they are accompanied by such intensity of pain and despair that it is quite clear that these people could not have survived so much pain. That would only have been possible in an empathic, attentive environment, and this.. | mothers | Alison Bechdel | |
| 617996d | did that require such a leap of the imagination? Perhaps affectation can be so thoroughgoing, so authentic in its details, that it stops being pretense... and becomes, for all practical purposes, real. | Alison Bechdel | ||
| aed2b97 | Maybe the mother manages to be a mirror only part of the time. In such 'tantalizing' cases, some babies learn to withdraw their own needs when the mother's are evident. | mothers mirror | Alison Bechdel | |
| 8128b6f | I guess I felt like I'd failed her [by throwing up]. She had so many demands on her...The one thing she needed from me was that I not need anything from her [Bechdel's mother]. | needs mothers | Alison Bechdel | |
| 97ab231 | But, Jocelyn, if I really were all those things [good, kind, talented, hard working, open to change, and adorable]... ...I would die.' I wasn't sure what I meant by this, but it suddenly struck me as the truth. 'Because you'd rather die than feel anger at your mother for not giving you what you needed? | needs mothers | Alison Bechdel | |
| 53aaba6 | I put the odds on a psychic deathmatch between Attila the Hun and Virginia Woolf at fifty-fifty. | humor are-you-my-mother attila-the-hun deathmatch virginia-woolf | Alison Bechdel | |
| b417018 | It was decided to leave her where she lay. She lies there | Ian W. Toll | ||
| 4518e31 | Throughout the Pacific, one could find an illicit trade in "torpedo juice," the high-proof fuel used in torpedoes. Beer was usually rationed at two cans a week. When a larger quantity of beer was obtained by backhanded means, it could be chilled by taking it to high altitude for thirty minutes. Pilots would provide that service in exchange for a share of the spoils." | Ian W. Toll | ||
| 97f75bf | Lieutenant (jg) Ralph Hanks, an Iowa pig farmer before the war, became an "ace in a day" by shooting down five Zeros in a single skirmish. In a fifteen-minute air engagement, his throttle never left the firewall and his Hellcat surpassed 400 knots in a diving attack. Hanks had to stand on his rudder pedals and use his entire upper-body strength to keep his stick under control. Intense g-forces caused him to black out several times. This fir.. | Ian W. Toll | ||
| 362c343 | As is almost always the case with the Army, and often with the Marines, it was very difficult to get enough men to unload boats, even slowly," he told Spruance on November 30. "As soon as the troops debarked from the LSTs and APs, they simply evaporated. Boats would lie at the pier for hours on end without a pound moving, while those garrison troops were out sightseeing." | Ian W. Toll | ||
| f479d36 | Marine Captain Bankson T. Holcomb, Jr., a Japanese-language officer detached from Pearl Harbor's codebreaking unit, picked up a transmission by a Japanese patrol pilot (probably the same one that had been picked up by the carrier's radar). The aircraft had reached the end of its patrol route and the pilot had "nothing to report." | Ian W. Toll | ||
| f9dfc5c | A jolt, a white flash, a thunderclap, and the Hayate was torn apart--her bow floated one way, her stern the other, each section bobbing pitifully on the sea, and then both quickly sank, taking 168 men down with them. The battery's crew let out a full-throated cheer. "Knock it off, you bastards, and get back on the guns!" bellowed Platoon Sergeant Henry Bedell. "What do you think this is, a ball game?" | Ian W. Toll | ||
| 5254851 | The french Captain tells me, I have caused a War with France," Truxtun wrote Stoddert. "If so I am glad of it, for I detest Things being done by Halves." The" | Ian W. Toll | ||
| fd3ef67 | Without a high flux of carbon and energy that is physically channelled over inorganic catalysts, there is no possibility of evolving cells. I would rate this as a necessity anywhere in the universe: given the requirement for carbon chemistry that we discussed in the last chapter, thermodynamics dictates a continuous flow of carbon and energy over natural catalysts. Discounting special pleading, that rules out almost all environments that ha.. | Nick Lane | ||
| df8b919 | All complex life shares an astonishing catalogue of elaborate traits, from sex to cell suicide to senescence, none of which is seen in a comparable form in bacteria. | Nick Lane | ||
| 37dc843 | responses to my questions fell into two broad categories, each associated (at least in my mind) with one of two people, Americans who lived in the twentieth century. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 8e0526e | All life on our planet is related, and the readout of letters in DNA shows exactly how. By comparing DNA sequences, we can compute statistically how closely related we are to anything, from monkeys to marsupials, to reptiles, amphibians, fish, insects, crustaceans, worms, plants, protozoa, bacteria-you name it. | Nick Lane | ||
| fb42865 | Buchner proposed that fermentation was carried out by biological catalysts that he named enzymes (from the Greek en zyme, meaning in yeast). He concluded that living cells are chemical factories, in which enzymes manufacture the various products. | Nick Lane | ||
| 7f39925 | Well, biology is not only about genes and environment, but also cells and the constraints of their physical structure, which we shall see have little to do with either genes or environment directly. The predictions that arise from these disparate world views are strikingly different. | Nick Lane | ||
| 7b66e28 | Pigments such as haemoglobin are coloured because they absorb light of particular colours (bands of light, as in a rainbow) and reflect back light of other colours. The pattern of light absorbed by a compound is known as its absorption spectrum. When binding oxygen, haemoglobin absorbs light in the blue-green and yellow parts of the spectrum, but reflects back red light, and this is the reason why we perceive arterial blood as a vivid red c.. | Nick Lane | ||
| 5e781e8 | Our bodies are historical accidents of evolution and ultimately can only be understood from an evolutionary perspective: how things got to be the way they are. From this point of view, a good guys-bad guys philosophy is a woefully inadequate way of thinking about molecules as complex as NFKB. Even so, this is the norm. NFKB is usually portrayed as Janus-faced, capable of abrupt swings from the good to the bad and the ugly. Sometimes it dest.. | Nick Lane | ||
| a8af30d | Core consciousness operates in the present, rebuilding itself moment by moment, mapping out how the self is altered by external objects, draping perceptions with feelings. Extended consciousness uses the same mechanisms, but now binds memories and language into each moment of core consciousness, qualifying emotional meaning with autobiographical past, labelling feelings and objects with words, and so on. Thus extended consciousness builds o.. | Nick Lane | ||
| 44cb4eb | When a molecule of vitamin C encounters a free radical, it becomes oxidised and thereby renders the free radical innocuous. The oxidised vitamin C then gets restored to its non-oxidised state by an enzyme called vitamin C reductase. It is like a boxer who goes into the ring, takes a hit to his jaw, goes to his corner to recover, and then does it all over again. | Nick Lane | ||
| 015d7a1 | We have established on thermodynamic grounds that to make a cell from scratch requires a continuous flow of reactive carbon and chemical energy across rudimentary catalysts in a constrained through-flow system. Only hydrothermal vents provide the requisite conditions, and only a subset of vents - alkaline hydrothermal vents - match all the conditions needed. But alkaline vents come with both a serious problem and a beautiful answer to the p.. | Nick Lane | ||
| 58d29b8 | But whatever our beliefs, this richness of understanding should be a cause for marvel and celebration. | Nick Lane | ||
| a386591 | Every day in the human body, some 10 billion cells die and are replaced by new cells. The cells that die do not meet a violent unpremeditated end, but are removed silently and unnoticed by apoptosis, all evidence of their demise eaten by neighbouring cells. This means that apoptosis balances cell division | Nick Lane | ||
| cb6833d | Sometimes you can see car crashes from a long way off, if the road is straight and both vehicles are heading towards each other in the same lane. | Nick Hornby | ||
| cbec4c8 | With these new techniques, a new breed of evolutionist is emerging, able to capture the workings of evolution in real time. The picture so painted is breathtaking in its wealth of detail and its compass, ranging from the subatomic to the planetary scale. And that is why I said that, for the first time in history, we know. Much of our growing body of knowledge is provisional, to be sure, but it is vibrant and meaningful. It is a joy to be al.. | Nick Lane | ||
| 668530e | Lane closed her eyes and pressed her lips together at the sound of the nickname, a thousand memories whirling through her mind. He hadn't meant it to hurt her, but even the smallest nick could reopen old wounds. | Courtney Walsh | ||
| 1af5565 | The Wizard and the Prophet is a book about the way knowledgeable people might think about the choices to come, rather than what will happen in this or that scenario. It is a book about the future that makes no predictions. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 5ee274f | TAWANTINSUYU In 1491 the Inka ruled the greatest empire on earth. Bigger than Ming Dynasty China, bigger than Ivan the Great's expanding Russia, bigger than Songhay in the Sahel or powerful Great Zimbabwe in the West Africa tablelands, bigger than the cresting Ottoman Empire, bigger than the Triple Alliance (as the Aztec empire is more precisely known), bigger by far than any European state, the Inka dominion extended over a staggering thir.. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 919e78d | The portraits were intended to parade their fellows like specimens in a zoo. Yet at the same time most show the castizos, mestizos, and mulattos dressed sumptuously, moving happily about their daily business, tall and robustly healthy each and every one. Looking at the smooth, smiling faces now, one would never know that on the streets of the cities where they were painted these people were scorned for their very diversity. One would also n.. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| aa8d44d | Menaced by environmental problems, torn by struggles between the tiny coterie of wealthy Spaniards at the center and a teeming, fractious polyglot periphery, battered by a corrupt and inept civic and religious establishment, troubled by a past that it barely understood--to the contemporary eye, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Mexico City looks oddly familiar. In its dystopic way, it was an amazingly contemporary place, unlike any other t.. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 0d8e89d | Indian farmers grow maize in what is called a milpa. The term means "maize field," but refers to something considerably more complex. A milpa is a field, usually but not always recently cleared, in which farmers plant a dozen crops at once, including maize, avocados, multiple varieties of squash and bean, melon, tomatoes, chilis, sweet potato, jicama (a tuber), amaranth (a grain-like plant), and mucuna (a tropical legume). In nature, wild b.. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 497f630 | Rare is the human spirit that remains buoyant in a holocaust. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 22aaeed | Before Columbus, Holmberg believed, both the people and the land had no real history. Stated so baldly, this notion-that the indigenous peoples of the Americas floated changelessly through the millenia until 1492-may seem ludicrous. But flaws in perspective often appear obvious only after they are pointed out. In this case they took decades to rectify. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 788fba8 | The conflict between these visions is not between good and evil, but between different ideas of the good life, between ethical orders that give priority to personal liberty and those that give priority to what might be called connection. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| f193209 | Those looking for a tale of cultural superiority can find it in zero; those looking for failure can find it in the wheel. Neither line of argument is useful, though. What | Charles C. Mann | ||
| b7571eb | visitors to Andean history note certain ways of doing things that recur in ways striking to the outsider, sometimes in one variant, sometimes in another, like the themes in a jazz improvisation. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 577c317 | Few things are more sublime or characteristically human than the cross-fertilization of cultures. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 8e35108 | T]he Indian deaths were such a severe financial blow to the colonies that...[t]o resupply themselves with labor, the Spaniards began importing slaves from Africa. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| d23bfbd | Nature's success stories, they are like Gause's protozoans; the world is their petri dish. Their populations grow at a terrific rate; they take over large areas, engulfing their environment as if no force opposed them. Then they hit a barrier. They drown in their own wastes. They starve from lack of food. Something figures out how to eat them. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| a8015a1 | think of the adherents of these two perspectives as Wizards and Prophets--Wizards unveiling technological fixes, Prophets decrying the consequences of our heedlessness. Borlaug has become a model for the Wizards. Vogt was in many ways the founder of the Prophets. | Charles C. Mann |