Joshua Rotella > Joshua's Quotes

“Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western spiral arm of the galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this, at a distance of roughly ninety million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet, whose ape descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea. This planet has, or had, a problem, which was this. Most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small, green pieces of paper, which is odd, because on the whole, it wasn't the small, green pieces of paper which were unhappy. And so the problem remained, and lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches. Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake coming down from the trees in the first place, and some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no-one should ever have left the oceans. And then one day, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, a girl, sitting on her own in a small cafe in Rickmansworth suddenly realised what it was that had been going wrong all this time and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no-one would have to get nalied to anything. Sadly, however, before she could get to a phone to tell anyone, the Earth was unexpectedly demolished to make way for a new hyperspace bypass and so the idea was lost forever.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“The businessman turns out to have a lot of zanshin. Translating this concept
into English is like translating "fuckface" into Nipponese, but it might
translate into "emotional intensity" in football lingo. He charges directly at
Hiro, hollering at the top of his lungs...
"Emotional intensity" doesn't convey the half of it, of course. It is the kind
of coarse and disappointing translation that makes the dismembered bodies of
samurai warriors spin in their graves. The word "zanshin" is larded down with a
lot of other folderol that you have to be Nipponese to understand.
And Hiro thinks, frankly, that most of it is pseudomystical crap, on the same
level as his old high school football coach exhorting his men to play at 110
percent.”
― Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash

“I would dower you with experience, without experience."
and I, in my turn, would pass that on to you.
But we make our own mistakes. We sleep unwisely”
― Neil Gaiman, Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders