#nature

In the detective story, as in its mirror image, the Quest for the Grail, maps (the ritual of space) and timetables (the ritual of time) are desirable. Nature should reflect its human inhabitants, i.e., it should be the Great Good Place; for the more Eden-like it is, the greater the contradiction of murder. The country is preferable to the town, a well-to-do neighborhood (but not too well-to-do-or there will be a suspicion of ill-gotten gains) better than a slum. The corpse must shock not only because it is a corpse but also because, even for a corpse, it is shockingly out of place, as when a dog makes a mess on a drawing room carpet." (The guilty vicarage: Notes on the detective story, by an addict, Harper's Magazine, May 1948) ↗

— W.H. Auden

#detective-stories #mysteries #setting #writing #nature

His act was rather that of a harmless lunatic than an enemy. We were not so new to the country as not to know that the solitary life of many a plainsman had a tendency to develop eccentricities of conduct and character not always easily distinguishable from mental aberration. A man is like a tree: in a forest of his fellows he will grow as straight as his generic and individual nature permits; alone, in the open, he yields to the deforming stresses and tortions that environ him. ↗

— Ambrose Bierce

#crazy #loneliness #society #solitude #nature

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

It is the nature and pleasure of townspeople to distrust the city. All the guiding principles that might flow from a center of ideas and cultural energies are regarded as corrupt, one or another kind of pornography. This is how it is with towns. ↗

— Don DeLillo

#distrust #towns #nature

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