#met

There's something incredibly sexy about sand and sweat and dunes photographed like women's backs. ↗

— Kristin Scott Thomas

#backs #incredibly #like #photographed #sand

Sometimes you get a glimpse of a semicolon coming, a few lines farther on, and it is like climbing a steep path through woods and seeing a wooden bench just at a bend in the road ahead, a place where you can expect to sit for a moment, catching your breath. ↗

— Lewis Thomas

#bench #bend #breath #catching #climbing

A multitude of bees can tell the time of day, calculate the geometry of the sun's position, argue about the best location for the next swarm. Bees do a lot of close observing of other bees; maybe they know what follows stinging and do it anyway. ↗

— Lewis Thomas

#anyway #argue #bees #best #calculate

Having long suspected that there was something alive in there, running the place, separate from everything else, absolutely individual and independent, we've celebrated by giving it a real name. My self. ↗

— Lewis Thomas

#alive #celebrated #else #everything #giving

I don't want to be reincarnated, that's for sure. When you've had rewarding experiences in your life - a loving family, friends - you don't need additional reassurances that you're going to do something with a new cast of characters. I'd just as soon pass. ↗

— Lewis Thomas

#cast #characters #experiences #family #friends

It is a distortion, with something profoundly disloyal about it, to picture the human being as a teetering, fallible contraption, always needing watching and patching, always on the verge of flapping to pieces. ↗

— Lewis Thomas

#always #being #disloyal #distortion #fallible

Most of the time I've worked in labs if I didn't encounter something in a week entirely unexpected and surprising I'd consider it a lost week. Lots of that is due to mistakes and stupidity, but it could open a new line of inquiry. Something really good turns up once in a hundred times, but it makes the whole day worthwhile. ↗

— Lewis Thomas

#could #day #due #encounter #entirely

There's really no such thing as the agony of dying. I'm quite sure that pain is shut off at the moment of death. You see, something happens when the body knows it's about to go. Peptide hormones are released by cells in the hypothalamus and pituitary gland. Endorphins. They attach themselves to the cells responsible for feeling pain. ↗

— Lewis Thomas

#agony #attach #body #cells #death

We are told that the trouble with modern man is that he has been trying to detach himself from nature... In this scenario, Man comes on as a stupendous lethal force, and the Earth is pictured as something delicate, like rising bubbles at the surface of a country pond, or flights of fragile birds. ↗

— Lewis Thomas

#birds #bubbles #comes #country #delicate

And what classical music does best and must always do more, is to show this kind of transformation of moods, to show a very wide psychological voyage. And I think that's something that we as classical musicians have underestimated. ↗

— Michael Tilson Thomas

#best #classical #classical music #does #i