#sol

[The modern age] knows nothing about isolation and nothing about silence. In our quietest and loneliest hour the automatic ice-maker in the refrigerator will cluck and drop an ice cube, the automatic dishwasher will sigh through its changes, a plane will drone over, the nearest freeway will vibrate the air. Red and white lights will pass in the sky, lights will shine along highways and glance off windows. There is always a radio that can be turned to some all-night station, or a television set to turn artificial moonlight into the flickering images of the late show. We can put on a turntable whatever consolation we most respond to, Mozart or Copland or the Grateful Dead. ↗

— Wallace Stegner

#isolation #loneliness #modern-society #noise #peace

Then there was the war, and I married it because there was nothing else when I reached the age of falling in love. ↗

— Guy Sajer

#marriage #soldier #war #world-war-ii #age

Not that chance dominated events in the early Solar System, for scientific determinism was also functioning. But chance is an essential factor in all evolutionary events, and the birth and development of our planetary system were not exceptions. ↗

— Eric Chaisson

#determinism #evolution #planet #solar-system #age

Ama wipes her hands on her apron, looks up at our old roof with new eyes, and lifts the baby from his basket. She twirls him in the air, her skirts flying around her ankles the way the clouds swirl around the mountain cap--her laughter fresh and strange and musical to my ears. ↗

— Patricia McCormick

#sold #music

The English soldier was probably the worst-treated soldier in Europe, and judging from the English casualty rates during the Napoleonic wars, English generals were more lavish with their soldiers' lives than were their French and German colleagues. ↗

— J. Christopher Herold

#napoleonic-wars #soldiers #age

Even if they've figured themselves gays at the age of five or fifty, there really isn't much of a difference in how society begins to accept them once they're out. ↗

— Teresa "Jew" Lariosa

#age

No - the light in Tamani's eyes was much more than a reflection. It was the fire that melted her anger and devestated her resolve, every single time she saw it. ↗

— Aprilynne Pike

#fire #light #reflection #resolve #anger

[Henry] felt himself bound as much in honour as in affection to Miss Morland, and believing that heart to be his own which he had been directed to gain, no unworthy retraction of a tacit consent, no reversing feared of unjustifiable anger, could shake his fidelity, or influence the resolutions it prompted. ↗

— Jane Austen

#resolution #anger

The dissolution of the nation destroys the national religion, and dethrones the national deity. ↗

— William Robertson Smith

#destroys #dissolution #nation #national #religion

You're going through the horror of it, you're going through the isolation of it but you're being empowered by reminding yourself that you're connected to everybody else. ↗

— Adam Arkin

#connected #else #empowered #everybody #everybody else