Notable quotes, excerpts, and profound lines.

[Uncle Robin]

from The Infernal Parliament, part of The Saki Megapack, a Fiend taking a visitor through Hell:

It is part of our system that relations should be encouraged to live together down here. From observations made in another world we have abundant evidence that it promotes the ends we have in view.

[Uncle Robin]

I laughed out loud at this one from Saki, much in the manner of Wodehouse, a testament to the old adage that less is more:

she made a quite unnecessary attempt to see if her pony would jump a rather messy sort of brook that was there. It wouldn’t. It went with her as far as the water’s edge, and from that point Mrs. Nicorax went on alone

[Uncle Robin]

Not profound, but wryly amusing, to me at least. From Printer's Error by Rebecca Romney

De Caro chose an India ink dating back to the 1800s that, when compared to modern inks, tested acceptably high on acid. Following a line of thinking that could be described in similar terms

[gmw]

For to walk a mile in someone’s shoes is not just to take on an element of their embodied experience but to take part in their journey.

-- Emma Geen, The Many Selves of Katherine North, 2016

[gmw]

I wondered how long it would take before I stopped discovering these petty little laws that’d governed my life, and whether I would only reveal them by breaking them. It was a rather cheerful thought.

-- Alix E Harrow, The Ten Thousand Doors of January, 2019

[Uncle Robin]

From "The Play, part of The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke by C. J. Dennis, one of the best final stanzas ever

Then Juli-et wakes up an' sees 'im there,
Turns on the water-works an' tears 'er 'air,
“Dear love,” she sez, “I cannot live alone!”
An' wiv a moan,
She grabs 'is pockit knife, an' ends 'er cares . . .
“Peanuts or lollies!” sez a boy upstairs.

[John F]

From a fortune cookie, twice:

"It is better to be the hammer than the anvil."

[Uncle Robin]

From "The Last of Snow" by Douglas Stewart, included in Australian Poetry Since 1788

It is the last of the snow
Under a bush on the heath
Like a little white calf forgotten
While sunlight bares its teeth

[gmw]

Conversation with a hermit living in the Northern Territory of Australia in the early 1960s:

We were sitting on the steps at his shack. Around us stretched a sea of tin cans and broken rum bottles.
‘Been doing a bit of drinking?’ I asked.
‘No,’ said Mull stoically. ‘Don’t get a chance, really. Most of those bottles would be twenty years old.’
‘Ever thought of tidying the place up?’
Mull looked at me severely.
‘Tidiness,’ he said, ‘is a disease of the mind.’

And another (seems the remote parts of Australia were crowded with hermits at this time):

But Roger had gleaned more than mere words from all his reading. He had a taste for poetry and was fond of quoting Gray’s ‘Elegy’, Shakespeare, Omar Khayyám, and the Bible. He recognized, too, that he was an abnormal character.
‘But I’m not sub-normal,’ he added quickly. ‘Don’t run away with that idea. I used to live in towns once with other people and got on perfectly all right. But that was before I got this superiority complex – before I decided that I could find no company better than my own. I came out to the wilderness looking for peace. This here is as far as I can go. In a sense, I suppose, I’m at bay.’

About the desert west of Alice Springs in central Australia and the people that live in it:

But only the Aboriginals living in their traditional manner can survive in it unaided. Unlike the white man, they make no attempt to dominate it. They do not try to tame its animals or to cultivate its sands, but to them it yields enough to keep a man’s soul in his body. In return, the Aboriginals worship it.

-- David Attenborough, Journeys to the Other Side of the World, 2018. From the section "Quest Under Capricorn" first published in 1963.

[covingtoncat73]

“Mind you, Darwin fretted about a lot of stuff, especially his health, his kids, and maybe with just cause. On occasion he would write a fit of histrionic despair, such as “I am very poorly today & very stupid & hate everybody & everything,”


“Alas, a fiction can fly around the world before the truth has managed to pick the sleep from its eyes in the morning."

“For a century the Neanderthal people have worn a stigma of hunched brutish grunting cavemen. Facial reconstructions of their skulls show them to look not exactly like us, and not exactly pretty. But beauty is a very subjective matter, and just because you don’t fancy them doesn’t mean that your ancestors didn’t. They definitely had sex with them.”

― Adam Rutherford, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes


/A very fun recent audibook "listen." I love listening to nonfiction audiobooks when working.

[Uncle Robin]

Originally Posted by gmw

It's disappointing to hear Attenborough regurgitating this "noble savage" BS. There is clear paleontological evidence of a MASSIVE spike in extinctions contemporary with the arrival of the first humans in Australia. The same thing happened thousands of years later next door in New Zealand, where humans wiped out the moa and species that depended on it within 2-3 centuries of arriving.

[gmw]

Originally Posted by Uncle Robin

It's disappointing to hear Attenborough regurgitating this "noble savage" BS. There is clear paleontological evidence of a MASSIVE spike in extinctions contemporary with the arrival of the first humans in Australia. The same thing happened thousands of years later next door in New Zealand, where humans wiped out the moa and species that depended on it within 2-3 centuries of arriving.

One of the hazards of providing quotes is that the lack of context means some readers may misinterpret. The two books in question Adventures of a Young Naturalist and Journeys to the Other Side of the World are republications of accounts of expeditions from late 1950s and early 1960s. This historical perspective is one of the aspects that made these books very interesting to me. There is quite a lot in them that would not meet with modern standards for this sort of thing (starting with the title of "Zoo Quest" when first published), nor with more modern thoughts fed by research since that time. Also, that particular quote comes just after describing a journey into the desert with some of these aboriginals, so it was literally true of the time he was writing, albeit without reference what may have happened 50000 years previously. There were other interactions described, with observations as to how the lives of the aboriginals were being affected by the mere presence of white settlers. For all that his accounts might not meet with the mores over half a century later, it seemed to me that there was an inherent respect in Attenborough's accounts that was uncommon at the time he wrote them. (This is still in the time of the Stolen Generations.)

[Uncle Robin]

Originally Posted by gmw

One of the hazards of providing quotes is that the lack of context means some readers may misinterpret.

Thanks for the expansion - it did seem unlikely that Attenborough would buy that old line.

[binaryhermit]

From a libel trial involving Private Eye in the UK

David Turner-Samuels (for the Eye): With your permission, my lord, I will read an extract from The Times Literary Review — "Lord Russel's works could be said to be pornographic…"[17]

David Hirst, QC (for the plaintiff): Read the rest of the sentence.

David Turner-Samuels: "But they are not."

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Quote_..._libel_defence

[gmw]

Originally Posted by binaryhermit

From a libel trial involving Private Eye in the UK

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Quote_..._libel_defence

Ha! Very good. I hope the situation above wasn't quite that egregious ... although I must admit to having been surprised by Uncle Robin's reaction to the quote. It never occurred to me (having read what went before it) to try and interpret the words that way.