Notable quotes, excerpts, and profound lines.

[covingtoncat73]

"When all's said and done, Civilization is just straight lines and bonnie white paint." -The Various Flavors of Coffee, Anthony Capella

[covingtoncat73]

From "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (Chronicles of Narnia Book 2)" by C.S. Lewis, Pauline Baynes -

"But in general, take my advice, when you meet anything that’s going to be human and isn’t yet, or used to be human once and isn’t now, or ought to be human and isn’t, you keep your eyes on it and feel for your hatchet."

[covingtoncat73]

“The Senator was vulgar, almost illiterate, a public liar easily detected, and in his "ideas" almost idiotic, while his celebrated piety was that of a traveling salesman for church furniture, and his yet more celebrated humor the sly cynicism of a country store.

Certainly there was nothing exhilarating in the actual words of his speeches, nor anything convincing in his philosophy. His political platforms were only wings of a windmill.”

― Sinclair Lewis, It Can't Happen Here

[covingtoncat73]

"That's the worst of doing anything with boys. You're all such swaggering, bullying idiots..." ~The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, C.S. Lewis

[gmw]

‘The Adventists teach, for example, that you should not eat rabbit. Of course, there are no rabbits here but a large rodent called a labba is roughly equivalent. Unfortunately, labba-meat has always been one of the favourite foods of the Indians and forbidding it was quite a blow to them. There is a story that a missionary once came across one of his Indian converts cooking a labba over a fire. He told the Indian how sinful it was.

‘“But this not labba,” the Indian said, “this fish.” “No fish has two big front teeth like that,” replied the missionary crossly, “you speak nonsense.” “No, sir!” said the Indian. “You know how, when you first came this village, you say my Indian name bad name, and you sprinkled water over me and say my name now John. Well, sir, I walk in the forest today, I see labba and I shoot ’im, and before he die, I throw water over him and I say ‘Labba is bad name, you now fish.’ And so now I eat fish, sir.”’

Although we had not actually set eyes on the beast, we had at least spoken to a man, who employed a logger, who had met an Amerindian, who had eaten one. It was really, I insisted, quite a narrow miss and there was every chance that the rewards I had asked the German to tell the Pole to mention to the Amerindians, would be enough to persuade them that a giant armadillo could be converted into something more valuable than a few pounds of rather tough stewing steak. We might get one yet.

-- Adventures of a Young Naturalist by David Attenborough
(a 2017 republication of an 1950s account of a "Zoo Quest" expedition)

[poohbear_nc]

"I can see that figure now -- pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn! It was Bartleby."

Bartleby the Scrivener by Herman Melville

[Angst]

Life is short and life isn’t fair. You’ve got to grab it and own it before it owns you. And I might as well kick somebody in the huevos if I have to, right?

--Derek Künsken, The Quantum Magician

[covingtoncat73]

" Nothing is more vain than dying for love. You have to live. And a living Lorenzo is worth more than a Romeo on the ground ".
- Albert Camus -

[covingtoncat73]

From "The Goldfinch: A Novel (Pulitzer Prize for Fiction)" by Donna Tartt -

"And I feel I have something very serious and urgent to say to you, my non-existent reader, and I feel I should say it as urgently as if I were standing in the room with you. That life—whatever else it is—is short. That fate is cruel but maybe not random. That Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn’t mean we have to bow and grovel to it. That maybe even if we’re not always so glad to be here, it’s our task to immerse ourselves anyway: wade straight through it, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and hearts open. And in the midst of our dying, as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn’t touch."

[desizm]

Music should come crashing out of your speakers and grab you, and the lyrics should challenge whatever preconceived notions that the listener has.

[Uncle Robin]

Originally Posted by desizm

Music should come crashing out of your speakers and grab you, and the lyrics should challenge whatever preconceived notions that the listener has.

Hum dekhenge (we will see) Faiz Ahmad Faiz

[covingtoncat73]

"The Bible could not imagine a scenario in which God reprents of having created Homo sapiens, wipes this sinful ape off the face of the earth, and then spends eternity enjoying the antics of ostriches, kangaroos and panda bears."

~Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus

[gmw]

A couple of quotes from: Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O'Neil (2016)

Like gods, these mathematical models were opaque, their workings invisible to all but the highest priests in their domain: mathematicians and computer scientists. Their verdicts, even when wrong or harmful, were beyond dispute or appeal. And they tended to punish the poor and the oppressed in our society, while making the rich richer.

[...] wealth is no longer a means to get by. It becomes directly tied to personal worth. A young suburbanite with every advantage—the prep school education, the exhaustive coaching for college admissions tests, the overseas semester in Paris or Shanghai—still flatters himself that it is his skill, hard work, and prodigious problem-solving abilities that have lifted him into a world of privilege. Money vindicates all doubts. And the rest of his circle plays along, forming a mutual admiration society. They’re eager to convince us all that Darwinism is at work, when it looks very much to the outside like a combination of gaming a system and dumb luck.

[covingtoncat73]

"You must stay drink on writing so reality cannot destroy you." - Ray Bradbury

[covingtoncat73]

From "Norse Mythology" by Neil Gaiman -

"“None of this matters. The world is burning,” says Loki. “The mortals are dead. Midgard is destroyed. I have won.”

“I can see further than you can, Loki. I can see all the way to the world-tree,” Heimdall will tell him with his last breath. “Surtr’s fire cannot touch the world-tree, and two people have hidden themselves safely in the trunk of Yggdrasil. The woman is called Life, the man is called Life’s Yearning. Their descendants will populate the earth. It is not the end. There is no end. It is simply the end of the old times, Loki, and the beginning of the new times. Rebirth always follows death. You have failed.”"