#ture

I often fantasize about torturing some of the lazier letters of the alphabet, like C, U, and E, because together they only manage to accomplish as much as the solitary letter Q. ↗

— Jarod Kintz

#fantasy #funny #humor #language #letters

Literary detection and firearms don't really go hand in hand; pen mighter than the sword and so forth. ↗

— Jasper Fforde

#guns #humor #literature #humor

What the semicolon's anxious supporters fret about is the tendency of contemporary writers to use a dash instead of a semicolon and thus precipitate the end of the world. Are they being alarmist? ↗

— Lynne Truss

#english-language #grammar #humor #lynne-truss #punctuation

I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers. ↗

— Ralph Ellison

#fiction #humor #rsas #humor

Since, in the long run, every planetary civilization will be endangered by impacts from space, every surviving civilization is obliged to become spacefaring--not because of exploratory or romantic zeal, but for the most practical reason imaginable: staying alive... If our long-term survival is at stake, we have a basic responsibility to our species to venture to other worlds. ↗

— Carl Sagan

#insightful #space-exploration #the-future #imagination

Mountains seem to answer an increasing imaginative need in the West. More and more people are discovering a desire for them, and a powerful solace in them. At bottom, mountains, like all wildernesses, challenge our complacent conviction - so easy to lapse into - that the world has been made for humans by humans. Most of us exist for most of the time in worlds which are humanly arranged, themed and controlled. One forgets that there are environments which do not respond to the flick of a switch or the twist of a dial, and which have their own rhythms and orders of existence. Mountains correct this amnesia. By speaking of greater forces than we can possibly invoke, and by confronting us with greater spans of time than we can possibly envisage, mountains refute our excessive trust in the man-made. They pose profound questions about our durability and the importance of our schemes. They induce, I suppose, a modesty in us. ↗

— Robert Macfarlane

#climbing #mountains #wilderness #imagination

Settling into a new country is like getting used to a new pair of shoes. At first they pinch a little, but you like the way they look, so you carry on. The longer you have them, the more comfortable they become. Until one day without realizing it you reach a glorious plateau. Wearing those shoes is like wearing no shoes at all. The more scuffed they get, the more you love them and the more you can't imagine life without them. ↗

— Tahir Shah

#moving #imagination

I finally felt myself lifted definitively away on the winds of adventure toward worlds I envisaged would be stranger than they were, into situations I imagined would be much more normal than they turned out to be. ↗

— Ernesto Guevara

#discovery #travel #imagination

One morning as I closed the cyclone-fence gate / to begin a slow drift / down to the cookhouse on foot / (because my truck wheels were glued / in deep mud once again), / I walked straight into / the waiting non-arms of a snake, / its tan beaded-bag skin / studded with black diamonds. Up it coiled to speak to me a eye level. / Imagine! that sleek finger / rising out of the land's palm / and coiling faster than a Hindu rope. / The thrill of a bull snake / startled in the morning / when the mesas lie pooled / in a custard of light / kept me bright than ball lightning all day. Praise leapt first to mind / before flight or danger, / praise that knows no half-truth, and pardons all. ↗

— Diane Ackerman

#nature #snakes #imagination

Don't forget that we lawyers, we're a higher breed of intellect, and so it's our privilege to lie. It's as clear as day. Animals can't even imagine lying: if you were to find yourself among some wild islanders, they too would only speak the truth until they learned about European culture. ↗

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

#lawyers #lies #lying #truth #imagination