#article

Life is wonderful and strange...and it’s also absolutely mundane and tiresome. It’s hilarious and it’s deadening. It’s a big, screwed-up morass of beauty and change and fear and all our lives we oscillate between awe and tedium. I think stories are the place to explore that inherent weirdness; that movement from the fantastic to the prosaic that is life.... What interests me—and interests me totally—is how we as living human beings can balance the brief, warm, intensely complicated fingersnap of our lives against the colossal, indifferent, and desolate scales of the universe. Earth is four-and-a-half billion years old. Rocks in your backyard are moving if you could only stand still enough to watch. You get hernias because, eons ago, you used to be a fish. So how in the world are we supposed to measure our lives—which involve things like opening birthday cards, stepping on our kids’ LEGOs, and buying toilet paper at Safeway—against the absolutely incomprehensible vastness of the universe? How? We stare into the fire. We turn to friends, bartenders, lovers, priests, drug-dealers, painters, writers. Isn’t that why we seek each other out, why people go to churches and temples, why we read books? So that we can find out if life occasionally sets other people trembling, too? ↗

— Anthony Doerr

#online-article #reading #beauty

Jane Austen’s world is a unique wedge of history, immortalized by her wonderful books. It is ironic that I am fascinated by the Regency world in all its details, when Jane Austen seldom mentions any of those facts. She never mentions the war raging in Europe, her characters are apparently unaware of the industrialization shortly to overtake them. The revolution of steam travel does not touch her people–they travel by coach, horse, and foot.” and “There is no doubt that Austen herself was aware of the world around her and its imminent change. But her characters live in the world of the family, the village and the heart–and are loved because of it. The trappings of the greater world do not impinge on Jane Austen’s books. ↗

— Lesley-Anne McLeod

#jane-austen #regency-world #change

We did an episode on Good Times which came out of a newspaper article about the incidence of hypertension in black males being higher than whites, and increasing. So we did a show in which James, the father on Good Times, had hypertension. ↗

— Norman Lear

#article #being #black #came #did

The summer of 1991, I took $2,000 of my savings and a desktop program, and I asked my friends to write 800 words about something they cared about. I got eight or nine articles and put them together. It was no frills, black and white, no graphics. I printed them out and just dumped piles around D.C. ↗

— Eric Liu

#around #articles #asked #black #black and white

My interest in matters more directly concerned with the handling of particles was growing, in the meantime, stimulated by many contacts with people understanding accelerators. ↗

— Simon van der Meer

#contacts #directly #growing #handling #interest

I wrote that letter, and the one to Nixon. And I wrote more letters, and I thought it might be a magazine article. At that time I sent it to Esquire and Playboy, but anyway, I kept writing, and all of sudden I had enough and thought, well maybe it is a book. ↗

— Don Novello

#article #book #enough #esquire #had

I have had the good fortune to see how my articles have directly benefited some farmers and helped build markets for their products in a way that preserves land from development. That makes me a hopeless optimist. ↗

— Michael Pollan

#benefited #build #development #directly #farmers

The particle and the planet are subject to the same laws and what is learned of one will be known of the other. ↗

— James Smithson

#laws #learned #other #particle #planet

A dwarf who brings a standard along with him to measure his own size, take my word, is a dwarf in more articles than one. ↗

— Laurence Sterne

#articles #brings #dwarf #him #his

It is good a philosopher should remind himself, now and then, that he is a particle pontificating on infinity. ↗

— Ariel Durant

#himself #infinity #now #now and then #particle