Notable quotes, excerpts, and profound lines.

[Angst]

Originally Posted by gmw

Ted Chiang - Exhalation (2008 - short story from the "Eclipse 2" collection edited by Jonathan Strahan).

The short story is (legitimately, as far as I can tell) available to read online on this link).

Thanks for the link. I absolutely love Ted Chiang. I just wish he was more prolific writer.

[John K]

"Dawn crept up on the Stanford campus like a cautious painter, mixing color into the monochrome gloom overhead so it faded through shades of gray toward a clean morning blue, layering beige back onto the sandstone angles of the hospital buildings one pale coat at a time, working from the top down. In the gardens, the hedges and trees got back their green and people started to come through on the gravel paths in ones and twos. A few of them glanced at the man seated alone on the bench, but none stopped. There was a curious immobility to him that drove off any impulse for human contact, and stilled conversational voices as they approached. Those whose work was in the acute wards at the medical center knew at a glance what it meant. This was a man undergoing surgery without anesthetic—the slow, sawtoothed severing of himself from another human being somewhere inside the hospital."

Richard K. Morgan, Thirteen

[covingtoncat73]

“Someday I will understand Auschwitz. This was a brave statement but innocently absurd. No one will ever understand Auschwitz. What I might have set down with more accuracy would have been: Someday I will write about Sophie's life and death, and thereby help demonstrate how absolute evil is never extinguished from the world. Auschwitz itself remains inexplicable. The most profound statement yet made about Auschwitz was not a statement at all, but a response.

The query: 'At Auschwitz, tell me, where was God?'

And the answer: 'Where was man?'"

― William Styron, Sophie's Choice

[AlexBell]

'We are apt to be kinder to the brutes that love us than to the women that love us. Is it because the brutes are dumb?'

from Adam Bede by George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans)

[astrangerhere]

“I think my mother's talents deserve a little acknowledgment. I said so to her, as a matter of fact, and she replied in these memorable words: "My dear child, you can give it a long name if you like, but I'm an old-fashioned woman and I call it mother-wit, and it's so rare for a man to have it that if he does you write a book about him and call him Sherlock Holmes.”

Lord Peter Whimsey in Clouds of Witnesses by Dorothy Sayers

[BenG]

And everyone of them words rang true
And glowed like burnin' coal
Pourin' off of every page
Like it was written in my soul.

― Bob Dylan, Tangled Up In Blue

[astrangerhere]

One of the ways of stopping science would be to do experiments in the region where you know the law. But experimenters search most deliberately, and with the greatest effort, in exactly those places where it seems most likely that we can prove our theories wrong. In other words, we are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.

Dr. Richard Feynman from The Character of Physical Law
Quoted in Lapham's Quarterly, Vol. XI, Issue 2 - Rule of Law
Emphasis my own.

[issybird]

Originally Posted by covingtoncat73

"The query: 'At Auschwitz, tell me, where was God?'

And the answer: 'Where was man?'"

― William Styron, Sophie's Choice

My favorite quote from Auschwitz is from Primo Levi's If This is a Man:

Silence slowly prevails and then, from my bunk on the top row, I see and hear old Kuhn praying aloud, with his beret on his head, swaying backwards and forwards violently. Kuhn is thanking God because he has not been chosen. Kuhn is out of his senses. Does he not see Beppo the Greek in the bunk next to him, Beppo who is twenty years old and is going to the gas chamber the day after tomorrow and knows it and lies there looking fixedly at the light without saying anything and without even thinking any more? Can Kuhn fail to realize that next time it will be his turn? Does Kuhn not understand that what has happened today is an abomination, which no propitiatory prayer, no pardon, no expiation by the guilty, which nothing at all in the power of man can ever clean again? If I was God, I would spit at Kuhn’s prayer.

[covingtoncat73]

Well, I think I've shared this one before but this is definitely my favorite and definitely relevant...

"There are accounts which, if we open our hearts to them, will cut us too deeply. Look -- here is a good man, good by his own lights and the lights of his friends: he is faithful and true to his wife, he adores and lavishes attention on his little children, he cares about his country, he does his job punctiliously, as best he can. So, efficiently and good-naturedly, he exterminates Jews: he appreciates the music that plays in the background to pacify them; he advises the Jews not to forget their identification numbers as they go into the showers -- many people, he tells them, forget their numbers, and take the wrong clothes when they come out of the showers. This calms the Jews. There will be life, they assure themselves, after the showers. Our man supervises the detail taking the bodies to the ovens; and if there is anything he feels bad about, it is that he still allows the gassing of vermin to affect him. Were he a truly good man, he knows, he would feel nothing but joy as the earth is cleansed of its pests."

~American Gods, Neil Gaiman

[BenG]

“You put too much stock in human intelligence, it doesn't annihilate human nature.”

― Philip Roth, American Pastoral

[BenG]

The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found
A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,
Killed. It had been in the long grass.

I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.
Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world
Unmendably. Burial was no help:

Next morning I got up and it did not.
The first day after a death, the new absence
Is always the same; we should be careful

Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.

― Philip Larkin, The Mower

[astrangerhere]

“There must be another life, she thought, sinking back into her chair, exasperated. Not in dreams; but here and now, in this room, with living people. She felt as if she were standing on the edge of a precipice with her hair blown back; she was about to grasp something that just evaded her. There must be another life, here and now, she repeated. This is too short, too broken. We know nothing, even about ourselves.”

Virginia Woolf | The Years

[bfisher]

" I couldn’t be disillusioned because I was never illusioned to begin with."

Andy Martin, "I'm Leaving Facebook For Good"

[BenG]

"But night’s a relative thing. It always ends. It does; because even if you’re not around to watch it, the sun always comes up, and someone’ll be there to see.
It’s a fine, beautiful morning."

― Gardner Dozois, A Special Kind of Morning (1970),

[BenG]

“It doesn’t take a declaration, or an invasion, to start a war, all it takes is an ‘us’ and a ‘them.’ And a spark.”
― Ada Palmer, Seven Surrenders