#l

Behjet eased the horse forward again. "The harvest is failing. There will be no crop at all if this rain doesn't stop - not even hay." The rain. The rain she'd been so grateful for, the rain that concealed the warping of her shadow. It was going to kill people. ↗

— Erin Bow

#guilt #natural-disaster #rain #realization #unnatural-disaster

É mais fácil, e mais vezes se realiza, a transição da vida errante, tumultuosa e agitada para estes monótonos prazeres do viver doméstico, do que a inversa; como se o pendor natural da índole do homem o chamasse mais para ali. ↗

— Júlio Dinis

#nature

legal investigation. As Clinton noted, “My goal in this deposition was to be truthful, but not particularly helpful. ↗

— Steven Pinker

#nature

All serious poker players try to minimize their tells, obviously. There are a couple ways to go about this. One is the robotic approch: where your face becomes a mask and your voice a monotone, at least while the hand is being played. . . . The other is the manic method, where you affect a whole bunch of tics, twitches, and expressions, and mix them up with a river of insane babble. The idea is to overwhelm your opponents with clues, so they can't sort out what's going on. This approach can be effective, but for normal people it's hard to pull off. (If you've spent part of your life in an institution, this method may come naturally.) ↗

— Dan Harrington

#gambling #manic #poker #tells #nature

The fantastic postulates that there are forces in the outside world, and in our own natures, which we can neither know nor control, and these forces may even constitute the essence of our existence, beneath the comforting rational surface. The fantastic is, moreover, a product of human imagination, perhaps even an excess of imagination. It arises when laws thought to be absolute are transcended, in the borderland between life and death, the animate and the inanimate, the self and the world; it arises when the real turns into the unreal, and the solid presence into vision, dream or hallucination. The fantastic is the unexpected occurrence, the startling novelty which goes contrary to all our expectations of what is possible. The ego multiplies and splits, time and space are distorted. ↗

— Franz Rottensteiner

#fantastique #fantasy #horror #imagination #supernatural

This is a spendthrift economy; though nothing is lost, all is spent. ↗

— Annie Dillard

#profligacy #nature

The excellence and efficiency of any nation or of our global community at large is driven by the collective empowerment of individuals. Gross consumer waste, haphazard bureaucratic spending, and the careless consumption of natural resources are all reflections of the mismanagement of personal power common within the average citizen. ↗

— Scott Edmund Miller

#societal-progress #nature

And what are you reading, Miss - ?" "Oh! It is only a novel!" replies the young lady, while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. "It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda"; or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language. ↗

— Jane Austen

#reading #nature

To expel hunger and thirst there is no necessity of sitting in a palace and submitting to the supercilious brow and contumelious favour of the rich and great there is no necessity of sailing upon the deep or of following the camp What nature wants is every where to be found and attainable without much difficulty whereas require the sweat of the brow for these we are obliged to dress anew j compelled to grow old in the field and driven to foreign mores A sufficiency is always at hand ↗

— Lucius Annaeus Seneca

#stoic #nature

The ancient Ionians were the first we know of to argue systematically that laws and forces of Nature, rather than gods, are responsible for the order and even the existence of the world. ↗

— Carl Sagan

#nature