#ck

Now that Janet and Frances were older, Grandpa would let them visit him in his study, where the parrot lived. Grandpa came from a long line of parrot-keeping men, and Polly’s predecessor, a white cockatoo, had fought with Wellington’s armies in the Napoleonic Wars. Janet’s father’s earliest memories were of the astonishing oaths known to this bird, who was then a hundred and two years old and spoke in ripe gamey accents long since gone from the world of men. Grandpa believed that there must be a fair number of such long-lived birds in Scotland—even perhaps in England—and it would have been a fine thing to have them all gathered in a great dining hall, invoking ghostly midshipmen and dragoons, violent drinkers and merry rhymesters, perhaps even occasionally a lady of refinement. This, he said, would afford a historical experience of rare value; indeed, ancient parrots should be fêted and cultivated as true archivists. ↗

— Elspeth Barker

#gothic #scottish #experience

If you want the government off your back, get your hands out of its pockets. ↗

— Gary Hart

#get #government #hands #off #out

I think a lot of the problem is that at 8 o'clock there's nothing on for kids. ↗

— Melissa Joan Hart

#i #i think #kids #lot #nothing

You get on TV and you become more of a star and it makes it real hard to go back to school and sit in a classroom, put your hand up if you have a question or something. ↗

— Owen Hart

#back to school #become #classroom #get #go

The fact is... our doors have not exactly been knocked down by companies willing to defend Microsoft's business practices. ↗

— Orrin Hatch

#business #companies #defend #doors #down

In an essay titled A View From the Front Line, Jencks described her experience with cancer as like being woken up midflight on a jumbo jet and then thrown out with a parachute into a foreign landscape without a map: "There you are, the future patient, quietly progressing with other passengers toward a distant destination when, astonishingly (Why me?) a large hole opens in the floor next to you. People in white coats appear, help you into a parachute and — no time to think — out you go. "You descend. You hit the ground....But where is the enemy? What is the enemy? What is it up to?...No road. No compass. No map. No training. Is there something you should know and don't? "The white coats are far, far away, strapping others into their parachutes. Occasionally they wave but, even if you ask them, they don't know the answers. They are up there in the Jumbo, involved with parachutes, not map-making. ↗

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

#cancer #maggie-jencks #experience

Why the fairy tale of Willie Mays making a brilliant World Series catch, and then dashing off to play stickball in the street with his teenage pals. That's baseball. So is the husky voice of a doomed Lou Gehrig saying, 'I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of this earth.' ↗

— Ernie Harwell

#brilliant #catch #consider #doomed #earth

If you're going to be crazy, you have to get paid for it or else you're going to be locked up. ↗

— Hunter S. Thompson

#else #get #going #locked #locked up

I hope that the Senate acts quickly to pass this legislation so that Americans will no longer worry about having to sell the family farm or business to pay taxes after the death of a loved one. ↗

— Doc Hastings

#acts #after #business #death #family

Hollywood panders to the 18-to-34 crowd. That demographic doesn't care about race and the package it comes in. They care about the hottest chick. They just like hot chicks. ↗

— Gabrielle Union

#care #chick #chicks #comes #crowd