#introduction

A story that began with, and exists because of, my love of the remoter parts of Scotland, where the bones of the Earth show through, and the sky is a pale white, and it's all astoundingly beautiful, and it feels about as remote as any place can possibly be. ↗

— Neil Gaiman

#love

They must go out of the theatre with the strength they live by strengthened from looking upon some passion that could, whatever its chosen way of life, strike down an enemy, fill a long stocking with money or move a girl's heart. ↗

— W.B. Yeats

#essays-and-introductions #money

I had the sets that meant so much to this character built - right in my home, especially the kitchen, which was important both for her character and for your introduction to her when Albert comes to visit. ↗

— Debbie Reynolds

#both #built #character #comes #especially

During the next few years I wrote a series of Martian pensées, Shakespearean "asides," wandering thoughts, long night visions, predawn half-dreams. The French, like St. John Perce, practice this to perfection. It is the half-poem, half-prose paragraph that runs as little as one hundred words or as long as a full page on any subject, summoned by weather, time, architectural facade, fine wine, good victuals, a view of the sea, quick sunsets, or a long sunrise. From these elements one upchucks rare hairballs or a maundering Hamlet-like soliloquy. ↗

— Ray Bradbury

#architecture

The conclusion of Dowell's narrative offers not a resolution, so much as a plangent confirmation of complexities. While Ford would certainly have agreed with Dowell that it is a novelist's business to make a reader 'see things clearly', his interest in clarity had little to do with simplicity. There is no 'getting to the bottom of things', no triumphant answers to the epistemological muddle offered in this beautiful, bleak story - only a finer appreciation of that confusion. We may remove the scales from our eyes, Ford suggests, but only the better to appreciate the glass through which we see darkly. ↗

— Zoë Heller

#beauty

One can begin so many things with a new person! - even begin to be a better man. ↗

— George Eliot

#new-beginnings #life

I joined the Army and was sent to the MIT radiation laboratory after a few months of introduction to electromagnetic wave theory in a special course, given for Army personnel at the University of Chicago. ↗

— Jack Steinberger

#army #chicago #course #electromagnetic #few

Why else do we read fiction, anyway? Not to be impressed by somebody's dazzling language - or at least I hope that's not our reason. I think that most of us read these stories that we know are not 'true' because we're hungry for another kind of truth: The mythic truth about human nature in general, the particular truth about those life-communities that define our own identity, and the most specific truth of all: our own self-story. ↗

— Orson Scott Card

#life

My first introduction to chemistry came at a quite early age through my mother's elder brother. ↗

— Geoffrey Wilkinson

#brother #came #chemistry #early #early age