Where Quotes (page 189)
The Saint whose water can light lamps, the clairvoyant whose lapse in recall is the breath of God, the true paranoid for whom all is organized in spheres joyful or threatening about the central pulse of himself, the dreamer whose puns probe ancient fetid shafts and tunnels of truth all act in the same special relevance to the word, or whatever it is the word is there, buffering, to protect us from. The act of metaphor than was a thrust at truth and a lie, depending where you were: inside,...
Thomas Pynchon
I asked the feedlot manager why they didn't just spray the liquefied manure on neighboring farms. The farmers don't want it, he explained. The nitrogen and phosphorus levels are so high that spraying the crops would kill them. He didn't say that feedlot wastes also contain heavy metals and hormone residues, persistent chemicals that end up in waterways downstream, where scientists have found fish and amphibians exhibiting abnormal sex characteristics.
Michael Pollan
Then must you speak. Of one that loved not wisely but too well, Of one not easily jealous but, being wrought, Perplexed in the extreme; of one whose hand, Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away. Richer than all his tribe; of one whose subdued eyes, Albeit unused to the melting mood, Drop tears as fast as the Arabian trees. Their medicinable gum. Set you down this, And say besides that in Aleppo once, Where a malignant and a turbaned Turk. Beat a Venetian and traduced the state, I took by...
William Shakespeare
O smile, going where? O upturned look:
new, warm, receding surge of the heart--;
alas, we are that surge. Does then the
cosmic space
we dissolve in taste of us? Do the
angels
reclaim only what is theirs, their own
outstreamed existence,
or sometimes, by accident, does a bit
of us
get mixed in? Are we blended in their
features
like the slight vagueness that
complicates the...
Rainer Maria Rilke
You know, when I was in Paris, seeing Linter for the first time, I was standing at the top of some steps in the courtyard where Linter's place was, and I looked across it and there was a little notice on the wall saying it was forbidden to take photographs of the courtyard without the man's permission. [..] They want to own the light!
Iain Banks