Michael Davis > Michael's Quotes

“I'm not afraid of death; I just don't want to be there when it happens.”
― Woody Allen

“Sometimes a landscape seems to be less a setting for the life of its inhabitants than a curtain behind which their struggles, achievements and accidents take place.”
― John Berger, A Fortunate Man: The Story of a Country Doctor

“People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“Even
After
All this time
The Sun never says to the Earth,

"You owe me."

Look
What happens
With a love like that,
It lights the whole sky.”
― Hafiz a

“Being angry is not just being slightly feverish; it is confronting a world in which other people look more hostile and threatening than they normally would. Actions of others which would normally appear harmless now seem like attacks upon one. The angry person is shorter than usual on confidence and serenity, and more inclined for aggression. He easily believes himself to be wronged. And so on”
― Mary Midgley, Animals and Why They Matter

“Everyone must come out of his Exile in his own way.”
― Martin Buber

“How surely gravity's law,
strong as an ocean current,
takes hold of the smallest thing
and pulls it toward the heart of the world.

Each thing---
each stone, blossom, child---
is held in place.
Only we, in our arrogance,
push out beyond what we each belong to
for some empty freedom.

If we surrendered
to earth's intelligence
we could rise up rooted, like trees.

Instead we entangle ourselves
in knots of our own making
and struggle, lonely and confused.

So like children, we begin again
to learn from the things,
because they are in God's heart;
they have never left him.

This is what the things can teach us:
to fall,
patiently to trust our heaviness.
Even a bird has to do that
before he can fly.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

“Stay calm. Be brave. Watch for signs.”
― Craig Johnson in Longmire series.

“If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you and you'll never learn.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“At Stone’s direction, Harry removed ovaries, blinded the female rats, and removed their olfactory bulbs. Sightless, hormone-deprived—it didn’t matter. The mother rats crawled determinedly toward the baby rats. They were slower, maybe, but the homing instinct was magnetic, needle to the north.”
― Deborah Blum, Love at Goon Park: Harry Harlow and the Science of Affection

“Harry was so exasperated by his frog experiments that one day he began venting to anyone who would listen. He even told his undergraduate class that he had spent countless hours just to prove that frogs were stupid. One of the students happened to be a reporter for the student newspaper, the Daily Cardinal, and the next day, Harry was in print: “Professor Harlow says that the frog is the dumbest of all animals.... Professor Harlow’s experiments showed that the frog does not seem to be able to learn anything at all.” It was a natural story for any journalist. The next day, one of the local papers rewrote the student version. It now carried the headline: “Frog Dumbest of Animals, Experimenters Discover.” That”
― Deborah Blum, Love at Goon Park: Harry Harlow and the Science of Affection

“At the end, in Harry’s handiwork, there’s nothing sentimental about love, no sunlit clouds and glory notes—it’s a substantial, earthbound connection, grounded in effort, kindness, and decency. Learning to love, Harry liked to say, is really about learning to live. Perhaps everyday affection seems a small facet of love. Perhaps, though, it is the modest, steady responses that see us through day after day, that stretch into a life of close and loving relationships.”
― Deborah Blum, Love at Goon Park: Harry Harlow and the Science of Affection