#to

We lived in the bowels of New York City. It was a struggle just to survive. This nice suburban kid hadn't had to do much of that before. ↗

— Peter Bergman

#bowels #city #had #hadn #just

At the moment they vanished they were everywhere, the cool benediction of the night descended, the stars sparkled, and the whole universe was a hill. ↗

— E.M. Forster

#india

Maxim 8: Mockery and derision have their place. Usually, it's on the far side of the airlock. -The Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries ↗

— Howard Tayler

#humour #mockery #rules-to-live-by #sci-fi #sci-fi

And then Franklin smote the ground and up rose George Washington, fully dressed and astride a horse! Then the three of them, Franklin, Washington and the HORSE, proceeded to win the entire revolution single handley! ↗

— John Adams

#rewriting-history #revolution

I tell girls, 'If you're tall and feel too tall, the answer is to be taller.' ↗

— Elizabeth Berkley

#feel #i #tall #taller #tell

People in the West like to shoot things. When they first got to the West they shot buffalo. Once there were 70 million buffalo on the plains and then the people of the West started blasting away at them. Buffalo are just cows with big heads. If you've ever looked a cow in the face and seen the unutterable depths of trust and stupidity that lie within, you will be able to guess how difficult it must have been for people in the West to track down buffalo and shoot them to pieces. By 1895, there were only 800 buffalo left, mostly in zoos and touring Wild West shows. With no buffalo left to kill, Westerners started shooting Indians. Between 1850 and 1890 they reduced the number of Indians in America from two million to 90,000. Nowadays, thank goodness, both have made a recovery. Today there are 30,000 buffalo and 300,000 Indiands, and of course you are not allowed to shoot either, so all the Westerners have left to shoot at are road signs and each other, both of which they do rather a lot. There you have a capsule history of the West. ↗

— Bill Bryson

#buffalo #indians #the-west #wild-west #recovery

Wars make history seem deceptively simple. They provide clear turning points, easy distinctions.: before and after, winner and loser, right and wrong. True history, the past, is not like that. It isn't flat or linear. It has no outline. It is slippery, like liquid; infinite and unknowable, like space. And it is changeable: just when you think you see a pattern, perspective shifts, an alternate version is proffered, a long-forgotten memory resurfaces. ↗

— Kate Morton

#memory #war #perspective

There are wonderful museums with lots of photographs of 1920's musicals. ↗

— Julie Harris

#museums #musicals #photographs #wonderful

She was like a nagging itch, repellent and at the same time tempting. ↗

— Stieg Larsson

#suspense-thriller #thriller

Disorder is inherent in stability. Civilized man doesn't understand stability. He's confused it with rigidity. Our political and economic and social leaders drool about stability constantly. It's their favorite word, next to 'power.' 'Gotta stabilize the political situation in Southeast Asia, gotta stabilize oil production and consumption, gotta stabilize student opposition to the government' and so forth. Stabilization to them means order, uniformity, control. And that's a half-witted and potentially genocidal misconception. No matter how thoroughly they control a system, disorder invariably leaks into it. Then the managers panic, rush to plug the leak and endeavor to tighten the controls. Therefore, totalitarianism grows in viciousness and scope. And the blind pity is, rigidity isn't the same as stability at all. True stability results when presumed order and presumed disorder are balanced. A truly stable system expects the unexpected, is prepared to be disrupted, waits to be transformed. ↗

— Tom Robbins

#order #rigidity #stability #totalitarianism #totalitarianism