#lan

Planetary exploration satisfies our inclination for great enterprises and wanderings and quests that has been with us since our days as hunters and gatherers on the East African savannahs a million years ago. By chance—it is possible, I say, to imagine many skeins of historical causality in which this would not have transpired—in our age we are able to begin again. Exploring other worlds employs precisely the same qualities of daring, planning, cooperative enterprise, and valor that mark the finest in military tradition. Never mind the night launch of an Apollo spacecraft bound for another world. That makes the conclusion foregone. Witness mere F-14s taking off from adjacent flight decks, gracefully canting left and right, afterburners flaming, and there’s something that sweeps you away—or at least it does me. And no amount of knowledge of the potential abuses of carrier task forces can affect the depth of that feeling. It simply speaks to another part of me. It doesn’t want recriminations or politics. It just wants to fly. ↗

— Carl Sagan

#planetary-exploration #age

I was cautious in what I said before the young lady; for I could not be sure that she was sane; and, in fact, there was a certain restless brilliancy about her eyes that half led me to imagine she was not. ↗

— Edgar Allan Poe

#insanity #sanity #short-story #imagination

I’d always imagined that I’d come up with something clever and pithy when it came to my last words, but as I stood there staring at those horrifying green eyes, I settled for a little startled profanity. How embarrassing. ↗

— Kate SeRine

#red #transplanted-tales #imagination

Merris, this is Mae and Jamie." Merris unbent slightly. "Alan's young lady, I presume?" Mae actually blushed. "Er - no." "Young Nicholas's, then," Merris said wearily. "What they all see in you, I cannot imagine." Nick leaned against the stall ansd smirked at her. "You'll never know until you try. ↗

— Sarah Rees Brennan

#mae #nick #imagination

What is more irritating than to see one’s subject, on whom one has lavished so much time and trouble, slipping out of one’s grasp altogether and indulging — witness her sighs and gasps, her flushing, her palings, her eyes now bright as lamps, now haggard as dawns — what is more humiliating than to see all this dumb show of emotion and excitement gone through before our eyes when we know that what causes it — thought and imagination — are of no importance whatsoever? ↗

— Virginia Woolf

#imagination

Earlier 18th-century literary language was not supple enough to connect the life of the imagination to that of the street. ↗

— Rebecca Solnit

#language #street #imagination

When somebody speaks a language that we don’t know, we often imagine that some important things are being said! ↗

— Mehmet Murat ildan

#imagination

Sports just happen to be excellent for avoiding foreign-language stage fright and developing lasting friendships while still sounding like Tarzan. ↗

— Timothy Ferriss

#language #sports #tarzan #friendship

Imagination is thinking beyond language. ↗

— Raheel Farooq

#language #thinking #imagination

True the greater part of the Irish people was close to starvation. The numbers of weakened people dying from disease were rising. So few potatoes had been planted that, even if they escaped bight, they would not be enough to feed the poor folk who relied upon them. More and more of those small tenants and cottagers, besides, were being forced off the land and into a condition of helpless destitution. Ireland, that is to say, was a country utterly prostrated. Yet the Famine came to an end. And how was this wonderful thing accomplished? Why, in the simplest way imaginable. The famine was legislated out of existence. It had to be. The Whigs were facing a General Election. ↗

— Edward Rutherfurd

#famine #ireland #potato #whigs #imagination