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“A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.”
Mother Nature wasn’t really motherly. Mom said nature was more like a bipolar aunt who treated you kindly most of the time but, now and then, could be a real witch, conjuring killer storms and vicious animals, like big toothy mountain lions that, if given a menu, would always order tender children.
Nature’s way was for the sharp of teeth to feed on those whose teeth were blunt, for the strong to rule the weak.
In Greek mythology, Gordius was a peasant who became king of Phrygia. He tied an extremely complicated knot—the famous Gordian knot—that no one could untie. When Alexander learned that whoever solved the knot was destined to rule all of Asia, he simply sliced it with his sword.
Verna refused to vote for any of the current political parties on the ballot. She was waiting for a new party to be formed that she called “the Common Damn Sense Party.”
He can’t tolerate being disrespected like that. If you allow yourself to be disrespected, you’re weak. The weak inevitably become prey. Prey dies. Prey dies by tooth and claw.
For the same reason—that you might become what you read—he avoided novels about vampires, werewolves, and zombies.
The morgue was a world of the dead, who were beyond help and hope, as segregated from the world of the living as any dream was separate from reality.
These days, Americans seemed attracted to such politicians if they were exceptionally gifted at virtue signaling while they slandered their opponents.
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
Nature was a green battlefield where the weak were forever preyed on by the strong. Nature did not care, nor did the earth, which for all its beauty was nonetheless a hard place, indifferent to its creatures.
Even on the brink of disaster, humans deceived themselves. They wanted to believe they would never die.
His favorite German masters of that field had written that intuition was merely a myth, that the concept had its origins in the Volkskunde of superstitious peasants who believed in such nonsense as natural law.
An enlightened man must be guided by cold reason based on clear-eyed observations and hard facts. When he gave credence to intuition, he was doomed as all such myth-besotted fools were doomed.
