#lon

The average pencil is seven inches long, with just a half-inch eraser - in case you thought optimism was dead. ↗

— Robert Brault

#case #dead #eraser #inches #just

For my confirmation, I didn't get a watch and my first pair of long pants, like most Lutheran boys. I got a telescope. My mother thought it would make the best gift. ↗

— Wernher von Braun

#best #confirmation #first #get #gift

I didn't know the full dimensions of forever, but I knew it was longer than waiting for Christmas to come. ↗

— Richard Brautigan

#come #dimensions #forever #full #i

I've also learned to no longer feel guilty if I'm invited out and don't want to go. If I start to say to myself, 'What's wrong with you that you're staying in five nights in a row to watch 'Forensic Files' instead of going out with your friends' I remind myself that it's what I need to do for myself at that point. ↗

— Edie Falco

#feel #files #five #forensic #friends

Suppose that a man leaps out of a burning building—as my dear friend and colleague Jeff Goldberg sat and said to my face over a table at La Tomate in Washington not two years ago—and lands on a bystander in the street below. Now, make the burning building be Europe, and the luckless man underneath be the Palestinian Arabs. Is this a historical injustice? Has the man below been made a victim, with infinite cause of complaint and indefinite justification for violent retaliation? My own reply would be a provisional 'no,' but only on these conditions. The man leaping from the burning building must still make such restitution as he can to the man who broke his fall, and must not pretend that he never even landed on him. And he must base his case on the singularity and uniqueness of the original leap. It can't, in other words, be 'leap, leap, leap' for four generations and more. The people underneath cannot be expected to tolerate leaping on this scale and of this duration, if you catch my drift. In Palestine, tread softly, for you tread on their dreams. And do not tell the Palestinians that they were never fallen upon and bruised in the first place. Do not shame yourself with the cheap lie that they were told by their leaders to run away. Also, stop saying that nobody knew how to cultivate oranges in Jaffa until the Jews showed them how. 'Making the desert bloom'—one of Yvonne's stock phrases—makes desert dwellers out of people who were the agricultural superiors of the Crusaders. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#analogies #arabs #colonialism #crusades #europe

During this period, I became interested in how the new techniques of cloning and sequencing DNA could influence the study of genetics and I was an early and active proponent of the Human Genome Sequencing Project. ↗

— Sydney Brenner

#became #cloning #could #dna #during

The world gets very small after a while, if you stick around long enough. ↗

— Edie Falco

#around #enough #gets #long #small

You know, I think there was a point in time when people didn't really understand how birth certificates were kept in the state of Hawaii, and now, I think that it's been pretty much disclosed that they used to have a long form and now they don't have a long form. Arizona used to have a long form, we now have a short form. ↗

— Jan Brewer

#been #birth #certificates #disclosed #form

He hits it long. His shoulders are impressively quick through the ball. That's where he's getting his power from. He's young and has great elasticity. ↗

— Nick Faldo

#ball #elasticity #getting #great #his

And I was very comfortable with this band even when we disagreed. It takes a long time to feel comfortable enough to disagree with somebody. When everything happened, it just was really confusing. It's like our weaknesses were nurtured and brought out front by outsiders. ↗

— Edie Brickell

#brought #comfortable #confusing #disagree #disagreed