#la

A brick is a rust-colored blur of movement, caught in a moment, and transformed from motion into a physical object. Studying this brick would give scientists an insight into how fast I run.
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— Jarod Kintz

#brick-and-blanket #funny #humor #random #strange

I don't think that when Zionism began there was a claim that we were losing - even in part - our capacity to contribute to other peoples. ↗

— A. B. Yehoshua

#capacity #claim #contribute #even #i

And after his unparsable response, including a passage where he said he was 'blurring the boundaries between a thing and thought,' she said, 'Thank you, I get lost sometimes,' while laying two fingers on his folded arm. ↗

— Steve Martin

#hilarious #art

Magic is like a lot of other disciplines that people have recently begun developing, in historic terms. Working with magic is a way of understanding the universe and how it functions. You can approach it from a lot of different angles, applying a lot of different theories and mental models to it. You can get to the same place through a lot of different lines of theory and reasoning, kind of like really advanced mathematics. There's no truly right or wrong way to get there, either--there are just different ways, some more or less useful than others for a given application. And new vistas of thought, theory, and application open up on a pretty regular basis, as the Art develops and expands through the participation of multiple brilliant minds. But that said, once you have a good grounding in it,you get a pretty solid idea of what's possible and what isn't. No matter how much circumlocution you do with your formulae, two plus two doesn't equal five. (Except maybe very, very rarely, sometimes, in extremely specific and highly unlikely circumstances.) ↗

— Jim Butcher

#magic #mathematics #art

If you look in an etymology dictionary, ‘etymology’ is derived from the Greek word for ‘true’. That’s why I don’t trust what people say unless they’re speaking an ancient language. ↗

— Bauvard

#etymology #funny #humor #language #truth

But the key thing is that Iraq, while it's got very large oil reserves, has marginalized itself as an oil exporter and these days its exports are only about one tenth that of neighboring Saudi Arabia. ↗

— Daniel Yergin

#arabia #days #exporter #exports #got

This has a lot to do with the unrest in Nigeria, but also with the production loss after the hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico, the decline in Iraq since the 2003 war, and the decline in Venezuelan output since 2002. ↗

— Daniel Yergin

#also #decline #gulf #hurricanes #iraq

I tutored myself in the art of solemnity, kept my euphoria private, and adopted a serious demeanour in keeping with everyone else and the general ambience of the house. I continued my solitary daily walks about the estate, carefully choreographing scenes and conversations yet to happen. I returned to those places of our clandestine moments together, replaying them in my head, languishing in his treasured words . . . and sometimes adding more. I stood under frosty sunsets, my warm breath mingling with the cold evening air as I watched the silent flight of birds across the sky. And even in those twilit autumnal days I felt a light shine down upon my path. For though he was no longer at Deyning, no longer in England, the fact that he lived and breathed had already altered my vision; and nothing, not even a war, could quell my faith in the inevitability of his presence in my life. ↗

— Judith Kinghorn

#the-last-summer #tom-cuthbert #art

Nobody seems to play Yamaha electrics, but it's the best guitar I own. ↗

— Daisy Berkowitz

#guitar #i #nobody #own #play

In trying to find out what Bruno thought of his priesthood, we now have a serious problem which we did not have before. In Venice, he told his fellow-prisoners that he was an enemy of the mass, and thought transubstantiation a ridiculous idea and the Catholic ritual bestial and blasphemous. He compared the elevation of the host to hanging somebody on a gallows, or perhaps to lifting him up on a pitchfork. He told somebody who had dreamt of going to mass that that was a terrible omen; and he performed a mock mass with Ovid's Art of Love instead of a missal. He joked about hungry priests going off from mass to a good breakfast. He spoke particularly ill of the mass as a sacrifice, and said that Abel, the archetype of the sacrificing priest, was a criminal butcher who was rightly killed by the vegetarian Cain. A phrase he used elsewhere, apparently about Christ's passion and not directly about the mass itself, seems nevertheless to express rather exactly his attitude to is: he called it 'some kind of a cabbalistic tragedy'. ↗

— John Bossy

#eucharist #giordano-bruno #ovid #priesthood #roman-catholic