#s

But clouds bellied out in the sultry heat, the sky cracked open with a crimson gash, spewed flame-and the ancient forest began to smoke. By morning there was a mass of booming, fiery tongues, a hissing, crashing, howling all around, half the sky black with smoke, and the bloodied sun just barely visible. And what can little men do with their spades, ditches, and pails? The forest is no more, it was devoured by fire: stumps and ash. Perhaps illimitable fields will be plowed here one day, perhaps some new, unheard-of wheat will ripen here and men from Arkansas with shaven faces will weigh in their palms the heavy golden grain. Or perhaps a city will grow up-alive with ringing sound and motion, all stone and crystal and iron-and winged men will come here flying over seas and mountains from all ends of the world. But never again the forest, never again the blue winter silence and the golden silence of summer. And only the tellers of tales will speak in many-colored patterned words about what had been, about wolves and bears and stately green-coated century-old grandfathers, about old Russia; they will speak about all this to us who have seen it with our own eyes ten years - a hundred years! - ago, and to those others, the winged ones, who will come in a hundred years to listen and to marvel at it all as at a fairy tale. ("In Old Russia") ↗

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

#forest-fire #future #russia #time #men

Why do men have nipples? Because God is a woman and she really wants us to enjoy ourselves, that's why. ↗

— Cameron Dean

#nipples #men

O, but they say the tongues of dying men enforce attention like deep harmony. Where words are scarce, they are seldom spent in vain for they breathe truth that breathe their words -in pain. ↗

— William Shakespeare

#men

Amy's lecture did Laurie good, though, of course, he did not own it till long afterward. Men seldom do, for when women are the advisers, the lords of creation don't take the advice till they have persuaded themselves that it is just what they intended to do. Then they act upon it, and, if it succeeds, they give the weaker vessel half the credit of it. If it fails, they generously give her the whole. ↗

— Louisa May Alcott

#louisa-may-alcott #men #women #men

But men labor under a mistake. The better part of the man is soon ploughed into the soil for compost. By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal. ↗

— Henry David Thoreau

#priorities #treasure #men

Real men can carry carpets, Claire. Keep that in mind when looking for a husband. ↗

— Isaac of Nineveh

#husband #men

Self-pity, while it should be accorded due respect, is the greatest of all acids to the human soul. ↗

— Paul Hoffman

#cale #fourth #god #greatest #hand

Men are a little different than women... We kind of regard virginity as something to dispose of as quickly as we're able to do so." Parker West ↗

— Emma Wildes

#men

For the former, activity, any kind of activity, was an end in itself; for the latter, activity was but a progress toward the true end, which was rest, and peace of mind. Action was to be undertaken only when equilibrium was disturbed. ↗

— Olaf Stapledon

#philosophy #men

She wanted to tell him so much, on the tarmac, the day he left. The world is run by brutal men and the surest proof is their armies. If they ask you to stand still, you should dance. If they ask you to burn the flag, wave it. If they ask you to murder, re-create. Theorem, anti-theorem, corollary, anti-corollary. Underline it twice. It’s all there in the numbers. Listen to your mother. Listen to me, Joshua. Look me in the eyes. I have something to tell you. ↗

— Colum McCann

#armies #children #lessons #let-the-great-world-spin #loss