The whole concatenation of wild and artificial things, the natural ecosystem as modified by people over the centuries, the build environment layered over layers, the eerie mix of sounds and smells and glimpses neither natural nor crafted- all of it i...
Prince John: That insolent blackguard. Oooh! I'll show him who wears the crown! Hiss: I share your loathing, Sire. That scurrilous scoundrel who fooled you with that silly disguise, who dared to rob you and made you look so utterly ridiculous. Prince...
A dog is a pitiful thing, depending wholly on companionship, and utterly lost except in packs or by the side of his master. Leave him alone and he does not know what to do except bark and howl and trot about till sheer exhaustion forces him to sleep....
’s discovery would not have been possible without the doctrine of conics. Now contemporaries of —such penetrating minds as and —were abandoning the study of geometry ... because they said it was so UTTERLY USELESS. There was the future of the h...
Please don't entertain for a moment the utterly mistaken idea that there is no drudgery in writing. There is a great deal of drudgery in even the most inspired, the most noble, the most distinguished writing. Read what the great ones have said about ...
You replace every molecule of every cell in your body within the course of only one year. I am not being flip when I refer to the "new you." It is quite literally possible, no matter how bad you are feeling or eating today, to be utterly transformed ...
[Speculating thoughts after an interview with A. A. Milne] The main point was that Mr. Milne took his writing very seriously, "even though I was taking it into the nursery," as he put it. There was no question of tossing off something that was good e...
Not to find one’s way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance—nothing more," says the twentieth-century philosopher-essayist Walter Benjamin. “But to lose oneself in a city—as one loses oneself in a forest—that ...
As Mary delivered what was to be her last lecture about the Galapagos Islands, she would be stopped mid-sentence for five seconds by a doubt which, if expressed in words, might have come out something like this: "Maybe I'm just a crazy lady who had w...
I know of no other place that is so fascinating yet so frustrating, so aware of the world and its own place within it but at the same time utterly insular. A country touched by nostalgia, with a past so great - so marked by brilliance and achievement...
One saw a bird dying, shot by a man. It was flying with rhythmic beat and beautifully, with such freedom and lack of fear. And the gun shattered it; it fell to the earth and all the life had gone out of it. A dog fetched it, and the man collected oth...
As reason returned to me, memory came with it, and I saw that even on the worst days, when I thought I was utterly and completely miserable, I was nevertheless, and nearly all the time, extremely happy. That gave me something to think about. The disc...
Your edict, King, was strong, But all your strength is weakness itself against The immortal unrecorded laws of God. They are not merely now: they were, and shall be, Operative for ever, beyond man utterly. I knew I must die, even without your decree:...
If they had had a different neighbour, one less sel-absorbed and more concerned for others, a man of normal, charitable instincts, their desperate state would not have gone unnoticed, their distress-signals would have been heard, and perhaps they wou...
I will insist you be man enough to take it. I won’t have you making light of my feelings, or making light of yourself—as if you’re not worthy of them. Because you are worthy, Colin. You’re a generous, good-hearted person, and you deserve to b...
If these bodies were really genes, fundamentally like our chromosome genes, they would give us an utterly new angle from which to attack the gene problem. They are filterable, to some extent isolable, can be handled in test-tubes, and their propertie...
[Religious belief is] outmoded and ridiculous. [Belief in gods was a] worn out but once useful crutch in mankind's journey towards truth. We consider the time has come for that crutch to be abandoned. It is a vacuous answer... To say that 'God made t...
How crazy it would be if the moon did spin and the earth stood still and the sun went dim! How absolutely ludicrous if snakes could walk and kids could fly and mimes did talk! How silly it would be if the nights were tan and the mornings green and th...
Without thinking, I knelt in the grass, like someone meaning to pray. When I tried to stand again, I couldn't move, my legs were utterly rigid. Does grief change you like that? Through the birches, I could see the pond. The sun was cutting small whit...
But whatever the form in which love appears, the lesson it teaches us is the same. We can never assimilate, never become, the beloved object. Possession is never complete, it will elude us in the end, and if we persist in our attempts to impose ourse...
Joshie has always told Post Human Services Staff to keep a diary, to remember who we were because every moment, our brains and synapses are being rebuilt and rewired with maddening disregard for our personalities, so that each year, each month, each ...
