Eli Weinstein > Eli's Quotes

“Imagine a Carthage sown with salt, and all the sowers gone, and the seeds lain however long in the earth, till there rose finally in vegetable profusion leaves and trees of rime and brine. What flowering would there be in such a garden? Light would force each salt calyx to open in prisms, and to fruit heavily with bright globes of water–-peaches and grapes are little more than that, and where the world was salt there would be greater need of slaking. For need can blossom into all the compensations it requires. To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing–-the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one’s hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

“Ascension seemed at such times a natural law. If one added to it a law of completion - that everything must finally be made comprehensible - then some general rescue of the sort I imagined my aunt to have undertaken would be inevitable. For why do our thoughts turn to some gesture of a hand, the fall of a sleeve, some corner of a room on a particular anonymous afternoon, even when we are asleep, and even when we are so old that our thoughts have abandoned other business? What are all these fragments for , if not to be knit up finally?”
― Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

“Cain killed Abel, and the blood cried out from the ground--a story so sad that even God took notice of it. Maybe it was not the sadness of the story, since worse things have happened every minute since that day, but its novelty that He found striking. In the newness of the world God was a young man, and grew indignant over the slightest things. In the newness of the world God had perhaps not Himself realized the ramifications of certain of his laws, for example, that shock will spend itself in waves; that our images will mimic every gesture, and that shattered they will multiply and mimic every gesture ten, a hundred, or a thousand times. Cain, the image of God, gave the simple earth of the field a voice and a sorrow, and God himself heard the voice, and grieved for the sorrow, so Cain was a creator, in the image of his creator.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

“Their lives spun off the tilting world like thread off a spindle, breakfast time, suppertime, lilac time, apple time.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

“It is a virtue, I came to believe long ago, not to make a meal out of one's emotional life. There's always enough work to do, not to mention that there's world enough outside.”
― Joseph Brodsky

“It is a strange world that has lost children and mute lightning in it, and where two men can sit overlooking an abandoned mining town and talk in sadness and hope of building ships to whitewash far-off ocean skies.”
― Oliver Morton, The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World

“Facts are often faint and flickering. They are the achievements of subtle investigations that must painstakingly stabilize evanescent effects or ingeniously combine several strands of evidence into a strong, weight-bearing cord. Above all, as their etymology suggests, [...] the most interesting and useful facts are not given but made, artifacts in the best sense of the word.”
― Lorraine Daston

“One of our finest methods of organized forgetting is called discovery.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin

“Orthodox science today attempts to be free not only of values but also of emotions. As youngsters would say, it tries to be "cool".”
― Abraham H. Maslow, The Psychology of Science: A Reconnaissance

“[S]cience, to [Walter] Lippmann, embodied a deep awareness of the irrationality and partiality of all human beings, which led its possessors to oppose the will to dominate wherever it appeared.”
― Andrew Jewett, Science, Democracy, and the American University