cardulelia carduelis > cardulelia's Quotes

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.”
― Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

“Immoral women do not exist", said the organist. "That this only a superstition. On the other hand there exist women who sleep thirty times with one man, and women who sleep once with thirty men.”
― Halldór Laxness, The Atom Station

“And after having seen the pale necromancers who in that room with its many forgeries of Nature had talked long windedly about mildewed bones to him who dwells inaccessible in the mountain tops, that fairy person deepest in our breasts, I was refreshed and comforted by the memory of this rugged image of my origin.”
― Halldór Laxness, The Atom Station

“There's a limit beyond which one cannot progress. The differences between the limiting abilities of those on successively higher steps of the pyramid are enormous. I have not seen described anywhere the shock a talented man experiences when he finds, late in his academic life, that there are others enormously more talented than he. I have personally seen more tears shed by grown men and women over this discovery than I would have believed possible.”
― Luis W. Alvarez

“Robert Oppenheimer used to tell of the pioneer mysteries of building reliable Geiger counters that had low background noise. Among his friends, he said, there were two schools of thought. One school firmly held that the final step before one sealed off the Geiger tube was to peel a banana and wave the skin three times, sharply to the left.
The other school was equally confident that success would follow if one waved the banana peel twice to the left and then, once, smartly to the right. (My counters were unbelievably bad because I didn't use either of these techniques.)”
― Luis W. Alvarez, Alvarez

“Azazello begged her not to worry, assuring her that he had seen not only naked women but also women with their skin flayed clean off”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

“Arthur Compton became my graduate advisor. He was the ideal graduate advisor for me: he came into my research room only once during my graduate career and usually had no idea how I was spending my time.”
― Luis W. Alvarez, Alvarez

“Around the lab I heard that publicity was measured in an absolute unit, the "kan". That unit was too large for ordinary application and a practical unit one one-thousandth of the size served in its place, the "millikan".”
― Luis W. Alvarez, Alvarez

“You can't stay in your corner of the Forest waiting for others to come to you. You have to go to them sometimes.”
― A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh

“Be who you are. / Give what you have.”
― Rose Ausländer

“Making female noises, shrieking and squeaking and being shrill, all those things that annoy people with longer vocal cords. Another case where the length of organs seems to be so important to men.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination

“Sara talked to a placeless woman about the end of sadness. It's coming said the woman. Sara pointed out that she was on fire and the woman mostly said screams after that. Sara knew they would spend the rest of their lives together.”
― Sara June Woods

“The sounds of southwestern cacti are broadcast for several weeks until, by general assent, it is agreed that cacti make no sounds.”
― Rick Moody

“If you aren't in over your head, how do you know how tall you are?”
― T.S. Eliot

“... a woman who was washing clothes in the river during the hottest time of the day ran screaming down the main street in an alarming state of commotion.
"It's coming," she finally explained. "Something frightful, like a kitchen dragging a village behind it.”
― Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they are found because it was possible to find them.”
― J. Robert Oppenheimer

“The experience of seeing how our thought and our words and our ideas have been confined by the limitation of our experience is one which is salutary and is in a certain sense good for a man's morals as well as good for his pleasure. It seems to us [scientists] that this is an opening up of the human spirit , avoiding its provincialism and narrowness.”
― J. Robert Oppenheimer, The Flying Trapeze: Three Crises For Physicists

“Finally, I think we believe that when we see an opportunity , we have the duty to work for the growth of that international community of knowledge and understanding with our colleagues in other lands , with our colleagues in competing, antagonistic, possibly hostile lands, with our colleagues and with others with whom we have any community f interest, any community of professional, of human, of political concern. [...] We think of this as our contribution to the making of a world which is varied and cherishes variety, which is free and cherishes freedom, and which is freely changing to adapt to the inevitable needs of change in the twentieth century and all centuries to come, but a world which, with all its variety, freedom, and change, is without nation states armed for war and above all, a world without war.”
― J. Robert Oppenheimer, The Flying Trapeze: Three Crises For Physicists

“We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to enquire. We know that the wages of secrecy are corruption. We know that in secrecy error, undetected, will flourish and subvert.”
― J. Robert Oppenheimer

“No man should escape our universities without knowing how little he knows.”
― J. Robert Oppenheimer

“Billy coughed when the door was opened, and when he coughed he shit thin gruel. This was in accordance with the Third Law of Motion according to Sir Isaac Newton. This law tells us that for every action there is a reaction and opposite in direction.

This can be useful in rocketry.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“In my prison cell i sit
With my britches full of $hit
and my balls are bouncing gently on the floor
and i see the bloody snag
when she bit me in the bag
oh, i'll never f--- a polack any more”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Alarms and Discursions

“When religion and politics travel in the same cart, the riders believe nothing can stand in their way. Their movements become headlong - faster and faster and faster. They put aside all thoughts of obstacles and forget the precipice does not show itself to the man in a blind rush until it's too late.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“He asked me if the alligator was a national symbol of the United States, because you saw them everywhere on people's shirts, just above the heart.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Bean Trees

“Humor. Two unconnected things are suddenly united by a paradigm shift. It is hard to describe, but we all know it when it happens. Weirdly, it causes us to make a barking noise.”
― Jesse Schell, The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses

“You thought, as a boy, that a mage is one who can do anything. So I thought, once. So did we all. And the truth is that as a man's real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower: until at last he chooses nothing, but does only and wholly what he must do. . . .”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea

“There wasn't a sane person left in Northern California. It was time to move somewhere else.”
― Philip K. Dick, VALIS

“If you don't make mistakes, you're not working on hard enough problems. And that's a mistake.”
― Frank Wilczek

“In physics, you don't have to go around making trouble for yourself - nature does it for you.”
― Frank Wilczek