Notable quotes, excerpts, and profound lines.

[covingtoncat73]

"When you sway in a hammock in August in Louisiana, you can see the concentric waves of heat shimmering and throwing back colors. If you hear music it's because it drifts in on the heat from radios in other hammocks under other banana and fig trees. Of course nobody works. The alligator is the model for both behavior and fashion. Move as little as possible and stay green and deep down. If you have to get up, invent a reason why you can't. If you're hungry, open your mouth and wait for food to fall into it. If you drink, drink gin and tonic or a mint julep. Keep your eyes half lidded and let the flowers perfume your somnolence. The world is a dream and you're a half sleeping alligator, stupidly treading water down in it." --Andrei Codrescu, New Orleans, Mon Amour, Twenty Years Of Writings From The City

/Pretty words, Andrei, almost makes August in NOLA sounds beautiful rather than suffocating.

[covingtoncat73]

“I thought scientists were going to find out exactly how everything worked, and then make it work better. I fully expected that by the time I was twenty-one, some scientist, maybe my brother, would have taken a color photograph of God Almighty—and sold it to Popular Mechanics magazine. Scientific truth was going to make us so happy and comfortable. What actually happened when I was twenty-one was that we dropped scientific truth on Hiroshima.” Kurt Vonnegut - 1970 Bennington College Address

[bfisher]

Great Vonnegut quote

[kennyc]

Yes, doubled edged sword just like a Ulfbehrt!

[bfisher]

Originally Posted by covingtoncat73

“I thought scientists were going to find out exactly how everything worked, and then make it work better. I fully expected that by the time I was twenty-one, some scientist, maybe my brother, would have taken a color photograph of God Almighty—and sold it to Popular Mechanics magazine. Scientific truth was going to make us so happy and comfortable. What actually happened when I was twenty-one was that we dropped scientific truth on Hiroshima.” Kurt Vonnegut - 1970 Bennington College Address

Your Vonnegut quote really struck me, as I have been grinding my way through Richard Overy's "The Bombing War" this week. In the epilogue, to illustrate how scientific research and methods was becoming integral to modern warfare, Overy cited a report on bombing late in the war:

"A report produced in February 1945 by the British Air Warfare Analysis Section, ‘On a Problem in Maximising the Expectation of Damage to a Target’, showed that with ‘N’ bombs dropped with modulus ‘h’ the outcome would be ‘H = (1−qn)ραρ’"

.

Again, thanks so much for the Vonnegut quote. You and Richard Overy have inspired me to have another try at reading Slaughterhouse-5.

[kennyc]

"Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead."
- Henry Charles Bukowski (born on this date 8/16/1920)

“Sometimes you climb out of bed in the morning and you think, I'm not going to make it, but you laugh inside — remembering all the times you've felt that way.”
― Charles Bukowski

[Barty]

Mme Merle: "When you've lived as long as I you'll see that every human being has his shell and that you must take the shell into account. By the shell I mean the whole envelope of circumstances. There's no such thing as an isolated man or woman; we're each of us made up of some cluster of appurtenances. What shall we call our 'self'? Where does it begin? where does it end? It overflows into everything that belongs to us—and then it flows back again. I know a large part of myself is in the clothes I choose to wear. I've a great respect for THINGS! One's self— for other people—is one's expression of one's self; and one's house, one's furniture, one's garments, the books one reads, the company one keeps—these things are all expressive."

Isabel: "I don't agree with you. I think just the other way. I don't know whether I succeed in expressing myself, but I know that nothing else expresses me. Nothing that belongs to me is any measure of me; everything's on the contrary a limit, a barrier, and a perfectly arbitrary one. Certainly the clothes which, as you say, I choose to wear, don't express me; and heaven forbid they should!"

Henry James -- Portrait of a Lady

[AlexBell]

'Authorship has never been with me a matter of choice. I have not done it for amusement, or for money, or for fame, or for any reason but because I could not help it.'

Harriet Martineau, in Harriet Martineau's Autobiography

[covingtoncat73]

“She was too tired to feel anything more, she wanted a book to do to her what books did: take away the world, slide it aside for a little bit, and let her please, please just be somewhere and somebody else”
― Lev Grossman, The Magician's Land

[covingtoncat73]

"The world was a desert, but he was a magician, and to be a magician was to be a secret spring - a moving oasis. He wasn't desolate, and he wasn't empty. He was full of emotion, full of feelings, bursting with them, and when it came down to it, that's what being a magician was." - Lev Grossman, The Magician's Land

[AlexBell]

'I have met with almost every variety of method among living authors; and almost every variety of view as to the seriousness of their vocation. But I believe the whole fraternity are convinced that the act of authorship is the most laborious effort that men have to make.'

Harriet Martineau
from Harriet Martineau's Autobiography

[kennyc]

"Once, poets were magicians. Poets were strong, stronger than warriors or kings — stronger than old hapless gods. And they will be strong once again."
- Greg Bear

*Happy birthday, Greg Bear!* The acclaimed science fiction author was one of the original co-founders of San Diego Comic-Con. The first convention, held in 1970, drew about 100 attendees, but nowadays the world-famous event attracts over 100,000 fans per year.

From Goodreads quote of the day.

[covingtoncat73]

“A dream is a personal experience of that deep, dark ground that is the support of our conscious lives, and a myth is the society’s dream. The myth is the public dream and the dream is the private myth. If your private myth, your dream, happens to coincide with that of the society, you are in good accord with your group. If it isn’t, you’ve got an adventure in the dark forest ahead of you.”

Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth (with Bill Moyers)

"I’d like to see the last Guinea worm die before I do."

President Jimmy Carter said during today’s press conference discussing his cancer diagnosis when asked about his remaining priorities,

[kennyc]

“We're all strange inside. We learn how to disguise our differences as we grow up.”
― Annie Proulx, The Shipping News