What you tell me the name of this place?
White dance, week night, raining, Alligator, Mississippi, long ways from
home.
Eudora Welty, Powerhouse
I have no defense to make.
Whatever I have done in West Virginia, I
have done it all over the United States,
and when I get out, I will do it again.
Mother Jones, the Court-Martial
Pratt, West Virginia, March 7, 1913
Joyce
Carol Oates, The Lost Landscape: A Writer’s Coming of Age
The line consists of an infinite number of points; the plane, of an infinite number of lines;
the volume, of an infinite number of planes; the hypervolume, of an infinite number of volumes…
No – this, more geometrico, is decidedly not the best way to begin my tale. To say that the story
is true is by now a convention of
every fantastic tale; mine, nevertheless,
is true.
Jorge Luis Borges, The Book of Sand
There is no political
system in which the spectacle of two men fighting each other is not a striking,
if unintended,
image of the political impotence of most men (and
women): You fight what’s nearest, what’s available, what’s
ready to fight you. And if you can, you do it for
money.
Joyce Carol Oates, On Boxing
Vex not yourself, nor strive not with your breath; For
all in vain comes counsel to his ear.
Shakespeare, Richard II
"Then let me
explain it to you with a very refined example. This may sound a little musty,
but I remember reading
it in a book. Oda Nobunaga once hired a famous
cook. The first time he ate something prepared by the cook, he
thought it tasted terrible, so he gave the cook a
sound scolding. After that, the cook, who had been punished for
serving his finest dishes, would only make second
and third-rate dishes, and he was always praised. Now, take
this cook – he might have been very shrewd as
far as working for a living went, but as for working for his art, which
was cooking, why he was insincere; he was a
degenerate cook."
“But if he hadn’t done
that, he would have been fired. He couldn’t help it."
Soseki Natsume, Kokoro
Men are encouraged to hunt
as well as they can, and the people rejoice when meat is brought in, but the
correct
demeanor for the successful hunter is modesty and
understatement. A /Xai/xai
man named /Gaugo described it this way:
Say
that a man has been hunting. He must not come home and announce like a
braggart, “I have killed a big one
in the bush!” He must
first sit down in silence until I or someone else comes up to his fire and
asks, “What did
you see today?” He
replies quietly, “Ah I’m no good for hunting. I saw nothing at all…maybe just a
tiny one.”
Then I
smile to myself because I now know he has killed something big.
Richard
Borshay Lee, The !Kung San
Rutherford told Marsden,
“See if you can get some effect of alpha particles directly reflected from a
metal surface,”
expecting a negative result. After Marsden had been
hard at it for awhile, he came to his mentor with a puzzling
observation: While most of the alphas passed straight
through the thin film as expected, some were deflected at
large angles, and a few even bounced almost
backwards off the target!
Dwight
E. Neuenschwander, The
Discovery of the Nucleus
"The thing is, I don't know what I'm going to do with
the ball, and if I don't know, I'm quite sure the guy guarding me
doesn't know either."
Earl “The Pearl” Monroe
An engineer? I had grown up among engineers, and
I could remember the engineers of the twenties very well indeed:
their open shining intellects, their free and gentle humor, their agility and
breadth of thought, the ease with which
they shifted from one engineering field to another, and, for that matter,
from technology to social concerns and art.
Then, too, they personified good manners and delicacy
of taste; well-bred speech that flowed evenly and was free
of uncultured words; one of them might play a musical instrument,
another dabble in painting; and their faces always
bore a spiritual imprint.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago vol. I
Trápani said to me, “Someone lent me your Carriego
book, where you’re talking about hoodlums all the time.
Tell me, Borges, what in the world can you know about hoodlums?” He
stared at me with a kind of wonder.
“I’ve done research,” I answered.
Jorge
Luis Borges
Father Guido Sarducci’s
Five Minute University
(Youtube)
My friends, as I have discovered myself, there are no disasters, only
opportunities.
And, indeed, opportunities for fresh disasters.
Boris Johnson, British Foreign Secretary
My experience of working from home is you spend an awful lot of time
making another cup of coffee and
then, you know, getting up, walking very
slowly to the fridge, hacking off a small piece of cheese, then
walking very slowly back to your laptop and
then forgetting what it was you’re doing.
Boris
Johnson, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
I write for myself and for my friends, and I write to ease the passing
of time.
Borges
Harvey
Diamond
"the learning outcomes are not currently clear
or measurable
or, in some cases,
even student learning outcomes at all"
Change Agent. Brand Ambassador
"The most profound innovations come from As writers, designers, photographers
a
deep understanding of systemic challenges
photographers, web developers
and leverage points for change." and overall brand ambassadors,
all of us are called upon to go forth
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