#sca

There's no real objection to escapism, in the right places... We all want to escape occasionally. But science fiction is often very far from escapism, in fact you might say that science fiction is escape into reality... It's a fiction which does concern itself with real issues: the origin of man; our future. In fact I can't think of any form of literature which is more concerned with real issues, reality. ↗

— Arthur C. Clarke

#future-prediction #reality #science-fiction #science

All space is relative. There is no such thing as size. The telescope and the microscope have produced a deadly leveling of great and small, far and near. The only little thing is sin, the only great thing is fear! ("The Jelly-Fish") ↗

— David H. Keller

#fear #relativity #scale #science #size

Horned humans are not unknown to medical science as there is a rare skin disease, which goes by the name of ‘Cornu Cutaneum’, a cutaneous growth, which resembles a horn and grows from the scalp. ↗

— Carole Carlton

#carole-carlton #cornu-cutaneum #horned-humans #horns-from-the-scalp #imbolc

But no. That was analogy rather than homology. What in the humanities they would call a heroic simile, if he understood the term, or a metaphor, or some other kind of literary analogy. And analogies were mostly meaningless — a matter of phenotype rather than genotype (to use another analogy). Most, of poetry and literature, really all the humanities, not to mention the social sciences, were phenotypic as far as Sax could tell. They added up to a huge compendium of meaningless analogies, which did not help to explain things, but only distorted perception of them. A kind of continuous conceptual drunkenness, one might say. Sax himself much preferred exactitude and explanatory power, and why not? If it was 200 Kelvin outside why not say so, rather than talk about witches’ tits and the like, hauling the whole great baggage of the ignorant past along to obscure every encounter with sensory reality? It was absurd. ↗

— Kim Stanley Robinson

#obfuscation #science

How can you sit there, calmly eating muffins when we are in this horrible trouble, I can’t make out. You seem to me to be perfectly heartless." "Well, I can’t eat muffins in an agitated manner. The butter would probably get on my cuffs. One should always eat muffins quite calmly. It is the only way to eat them." "I say it’s perfectly heartless your eating muffins at all, under the circumstances. ↗

— Oscar Wilde

#algy #calm #calmness #heartless #heartlessness

Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real. ↗

— Cormac McCarthy

#injuries #memory #past #reality #scars

Anybody can make history; only a great man can write it. ↗

— Oscar Wilde

#history #oscar-wilde #historical

Photography is the story I fail to put into words. ↗

— Destin Sparks

#landscape-photography #photography #photography-quotes #photography

As I handed her the bag, the old scars on my wrist throbbed with buried memories. ↗

— Maggie Stiefvater

#scars #sam

I couldn't escape him, now or ever. He'd always be there, consuming my every thought, my heart locked in his hands. I was drawn to him by forces I couldn't control, let alone escape. ↗

— Becca Fitzpatrick

#nora #patch #romance #escape