Notable quotes, excerpts, and profound lines.

[BenG]

"We really must make a compromise," thought Miss Mapp, meaning that everybody must come round to her way of thinking..."
— E.F. Benson, The Male Impersonator, a short story in The Mapp and Lucia Omnibus from the Mobile Read library.

[WT Sharpe]

INTERPRETER, n. One who enables two persons of different languages to understand each other by repeating to each what it would have been to the interpreter's advantage for the other to have said.
— Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), , American journalist, writer, and satirist. The Devil's Dictionary (1911, first published in book form as The Cynic's Wordbook, 1906).

[covingtoncat73]

“I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.”
― Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum

“But as it turns out, love doesn’t set us free—love keeps standing outside the jail on an endless candlelight vigil. So love? Yes, love was pain as well. Especially love.”
― Adrian Barnes, Nod

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by covingtoncat73

“I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.”
― Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum
....

Love that!

[covingtoncat73]

Originally Posted by kennyc

Love that!

De nada, Mr. K.

“There’s a natural point in the development of any religion where the prophet becomes first a nuisance and then a positive liability. Just imagine Jesus walking into an evangelical church while the collection plate was being passed around”


― Adrian Barnes, Nod

[covingtoncat73]

“All animals except man know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it.”
― Samuel Butler (born Dec 4, 1875)

[bfisher]

Originally Posted by covingtoncat73

“I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.”
― Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum

[kennyc]

"It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination. The city burning is Los Angeles's deepest image of itself; Nathanael West perceived that, in The Day of the Locust; and at the time of the 1965 Watts riots what struck the imagination most indelibly were the fires. For days one could drive the Harbor Freeway and see the city on fire, just as we had always known it would be in the end. Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, and, just as the reliably long and bitter winters of New England determine the way life is lived there, so the violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The wind shows us how close to the edge we are."

- Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

[kennyc]

"That was the year, my twenty-eighth, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it."
- Joan Didion

[astrangerhere]

There was a time when the mere nonexistence of war was enough. Not any more. The world is in the odd position of being intellectually opposed to war, spiritually committed to it.

E.B. White writing for the New Yorker Magazine on September 2, 1939. Reprinted in The 40's: The Story of a Decade.

[WT Sharpe]

The Master Clock's modest appearance is deceiving: this remarkable machine "talks" to the USNO's other clocks, and constantly corrects itself to best reflect their collective timekeeping output. And it does so with staggering precision. It keeps time to within one hundred picoseconds - one hundred trillionths of a second — over the course of each day, every day. Had it been set when the dinosaurs went extinct, 60 million years ago, it would have gained or lost no more than about two seconds.
I glance at my watch. One of us is off by fifty seconds. I'm guessing it's me.
– Dan Falk (1966), Canadian science journalist, broadcaster, and author. In Search of Time: The Science of a Curious Dimension (2008). [USNO stands for United States Naval Observatory.]

[kennyc]

"What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books."
- Thomas Carlyle

[WT Sharpe]

The significance of man is that he is that part of the universe that asks the question, What is the significance of man? He alone can stand apart imaginatively and, regarding himself and the universe in their eternal aspects, pronounce a judgment: The significance of man is that he is insignificant and is aware of it.

— Carl Becker (1873-1945), U.S. historian. Progress and Power Lecture 3 (1935).

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by WT Sharpe

The significance of man is that he is that part of the universe that asks the question, What is the significance of man? He alone can stand apart imaginatively and, regarding himself and the universe in their eternal aspects, pronounce a judgment: The significance of man is that he is insignificant and is aware of it.

— Carl Becker (1873-1945), U.S. historian. Progress and Power Lecture 3 (1935).

[bfisher]

Homer to Lisa: "Why are you reading when there's so much to watch on TV?"