#ren

It's all in the reflexes. ↗

— "Jack Burton" (Kurt Russell)

#prescience #reflexes #survival #survival-instinct #movies

C’est moi, c’est moi,’tis I,' I told him. It seemed appropriately melodramatic, though I didn’t know if he’d catch the reference. I shouldn’t have worried. Unexpectedly, he laughed. “Trust you to quote Lancelot rather than Guinevere. ↗

— Patricia Briggs

#mercy-thompson #musical-theater-reference #paranormal #sexism #shifter

Anyone who lives in her own world is crazy. Like schizophrenics, psychopaths, maniacs. I mean people who are different from others.' Like you?' On the other hand,' Zedka continued, pretending not to have heard the remark, 'you have Einstein, saying that there was no time or space, just a combination of the two. Or Columbus, insisting that on the other side of the world lay not an abyss but a continent. Or Edmund Hillary, convinced that a man could reach the top of Everest. Or the Beatles, who created an entirely different sort of music and dressed like people from another time. Those people--and thousands of others--all lived in their own world. ↗

— Paulo Coelho

#different #music

It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness of pain: of strength and freedom. The beauty of disappointment and never-satisfied love. The cruel beauty of nature and everlasting beauty of monotony. ↗

— Benjamin Britten

#beautiful #beauty #cruel #disappointment #everlasting

According to the surgeon general, obesity today is officially an epidemic; it is arguably the most pressing public health problem we face, costing the health care system an estimated $90 billion a year. Three of every five Americans are overweight; one of every five is obese. The disease formerly known as adult-onset diabetes has had to be renamed Type II diabetes since it now occurs so frequently in children. A recent study in the Journal of the American Medical Association predicts that a child born in 2000 has a one-in-three chance of developing diabetes. (An African American child's chances are two in five.) Because of diabetes and all the other health problems that accompany obesity, today's children may turn out to be the first generation of Americans whose life expectancy will actually be shorter than that of their parents. The problem is not limited to America: The United Nations reported that in 2000 the number of people suffering from overnutrition--a billion--had officially surpassed the number suffering from malnutrition--800 million. ↗

— Michael Pollan

#diabetes #fatties #food #health #health-care

I sadly want a reform in the construction of children. Nature's only idea seems to be to make them machines for the production of incessant noise. ↗

— Wilkie Collins

#noise #nature

I’ve always been a sort of self-imposed outsider, not a geeky outsider or a snobby outsider but, I just have a natural desire to live on the fringe. I’m not like a weirdo with a trench-coat but I just prefer to be alone or minimally surrounded by people. ↗

— Sara Quin

#living-on-the-fringe #outsider #sara-quin #solitude #surrounded-by-people

We had seen God in His splendors, heard the text that Nature renders. We had reached the naked soul of man. ↗

— Ernest Shackleton

#had #heard #his #man #naked

Children are natural practitioners of the Queer and the Questing, for childhood is nothing but a quest through a queer country. Of course, they often have a good deal of trouble with the Quiet. ↗

— Catherynne M. Valente

#quiet #nature

Man often becomes what he believes himself to be. If I keep on saying to myself that I cannot do a certain thing, it is possible that I may end by really becoming incapable of doing it. On the contrary, if I have the belief that I can do it, I shall surely acquire the capacity to do it even if I may not have it at the beginning. ↗

— Mahatma Gandhi

#capability #confidence #optimism #possibility #skills