Derek > Derek's Quotes

“...one never knows what interesting fact will turn up when researching a book!”
― Ellen Prager, Sex, Drugs, and Sea Slime: The Ocean's Oddest Creatures

“Again we are all sprung from the same seed, all have the same father, by whom mother earth the giver of increase, when she has taken in from him the liquid drops of moisture, conceives and bears goodly crops and joyous trees and the race of man, bears all kinds of brute beasts, in that she supplies food with which all feed their bodies and lead a pleasant life and continue their race; wherefore with good cause she has gotten the name of mother.”
― Lucretius, The Nature of Things

“That also which before was from the earth, passes back into the earth, and that which was sent from the borders of ether, is carried back and taken in again by the quarters of heaven. Death does not extinguish things in such a way as to destroy the bodies of matter, but only breaks up the union amongst them, and then joins anew the different elements with others; and thus it comes to pass that all things change their shapes and alter their colors and receive sensations and in a moment yield them up...”
― Lucretius, The Nature of Things

“A man who loves his daughter does not let her go into Wales.”
― Bernard Cornwell, The Empty Throne

“The authors of literary works may not have intended all the subtleties, complexities, undertones, and overtones that are attributed to them by critics and by students writing doctoral theses."
"That's what God says about geologists," I told him...”
― John McPhee, Basin and Range

“Don't give me your Christian shit about forgiveness.”
― Bernard Cornwell, Warriors of the Storm

“There are not many persons who know what wonders are opened to them in the stories and visions of their youth; for when as children we listen and dream, we think but half-formed thoughts, and when as men we try to remember, we are dulled and prosaic with the poison of life.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft

“...and then we know that we have looked back through the ivory gates into that world of wonder which was ours before we were wise and unhappy.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, Celephaïs

“Dead people are infinities of maybes.”
― J. Michael Straczynski, Superman: Earth One, Volume 2

“Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression, and violence and enjoy it to the full.”
― Leon Trotsky

“Fascism has opened up the depths of society for politics...there lives alongside the 20th century the tenth and thirteenth...What inexhaustible reserves they possess of darkness, ignorance and savagery! Despair has raised them to their feet, fascism has given them a banner. Everything that should have been eliminated from the national organism in the form of cultural excrement in the course of normal development of society has now come gushing out from the throat; capitalist society is puking up the undigested barbarism. Such is the physiology of Nazism...”
― Leon Trotsky

“Since therefore I see that the chiefest members and parts of the world are destroyed and begotten anew, I may be sure that for heaven and earth as well there has been a time of beginning and there will be a time of destruction.”
― Lucretius

“Again see you not that even stones are conquered by time, that high towers fall and rocks moulder away, that shrines and idols of gods are worn down with decay, and that holy divinity cannot prolong the bounds of fate or struggle against the fixed laws of nature?”
― Lucretius, On the Nature of Things

“These great monoliths were quarried in Upper Egypt, were floated in barges down the Nile, were towed across the Mediterranean to Byblos or Tripolis and thence were hauled, by oxen, mules and men, uphill to Homs, and from Homs southward to Baalbek, or east, across the desert, to Palmyra.
What a labour of giants! And, from the utilitarian point of view, how marvellously pointless!”
― Aldous Huxley, Heaven and Hell

“[...] Technology has tended to devaluate the traditional vision-inducing materials. The illumination of a city, for example, was once a rare event, reserved for victories and national holidays, for the canonization of saints and the crowning of kings. Now it occurs nightly and celebrates the virtues of gin, cigarettes and toothpaste.”
― Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception & Heaven and Hell

“What do we know," he had said, "of the world and the universe about us? Our means of receiving impressions are absurdly few, and our notions of surrounding objects infinitely narrow. We see things only as we are constructed to see them, and can gain no idea of their absolute nature. With five feeble senses we pretend to comprehend the boundlessly complex cosmos...”
― H.P. Lovecraft

“...humdrum lives breed wistful longings of the unknown...”
― H.P. Lovecraft

“Wonder had gone away, and he had forgotten that all life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and no cause to value one above the other.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, The Silver Key

“What he failed to recall was that the deeds of reality are just as inane and childish, and even more absurd because their actors persist in fancying them full of meaning and purpose as the blind cosmos grinds aimlessly on from nothing to something and from something back to nothing again, neither heeding nor knowing the wishes or existence of the minds that flicker for a second now and then in the darkness.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, The Silver Key

“In this fashion, knowledge begets questions which beget new technology which provides answers--which in turn beget questions. This is the implacable carousel of research.”
― Richard Fortey, Earth: An Intimate History

“German professors of that time were like God, only more frightening.”
― Richard Fortey, Earth: An Intimate History

“Parents often sacrifice a lot for their offspring, and lengthy, restrictive periods of parental care can sometimes have detrimental or even deadly effects on the parent(s).”
― Dean Lomax