#win

You see... I'm holy. Holey, Fred, geddit?" "Pathetic," he told George. "Pathetic! With the whole wide world of ear-related humor before you, you go with holey? ↗

— J.K. Rowling

#humor #puns #twins #death

They knew that love snatched in the face of danger and death was doubly sweet for the strange excitement that went with it. ↗

— Margaret Mitchell

#gone-with-the-wind #death

Dangerous and indifferent ground: against its fixed mass the tragedies of people count for nothing although the signs of misadventure are everywhere. No past slaughter nor cruelty, no accident nor murder that occurs on the little ranches or at the isolate crossroads with their bare populations of three or seventeen, or in the reckless trailer courts of mining towns delays the flood of morning light. Fences, cattle, roads, refineries, mines, gravel pits, traffic lights, graffiti'd celebration of athletic victory on bridge overpass, crust of blood on the Wal-Mart loading dock, the sun-faded wreaths of plastic flowers marking death on the highway are ephemeral. Other cultures have camped here a while and disappeared. Only earth and sky matter. Only the endlessly repeated flood of morning light. You begin to see that God does not owe us much beyond that. ↗

— Annie Proulx

#landscape #weather #western #wind #death

It was the first time in a half century that they had been so close and had enough time to look at each other with some serenity and they had seen each other for what they were: two old people, ambushed by death, who had nothing in common except the mercy of an ephemeral past that was no longer theirs but belonged to two young people who had vanished and who could have been their grandchildren. ↗

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

#growing-old #death

Everybody was dying, or already dead, or leaving other people, and the year was dying into winter, and the only thing to do was make some noise. ↗

— Marina Endicott

#winter #death

Spurred by Amy’s death I’ve tried to salvage unwilling victims from the mayhem of the internal storm and am always, always just pulled inside myself. ↗

— Russell Brand

#amy-winehouse #drug-addiction #recovery #death

I always wondered what it must be like to lose a twin—if somehow Mary felt it like it was happening to her. If she felt physical pain. ↗

— Francesca Lia Block

#death-and-dying #death-of-a-loved-one #empathetic #empathy #loss

Finally, from what we now know about the cosmos, to think that all this was created for just one species among the tens of millions of species who live on one planet circling one of a couple of hundred billion stars that are located in one galaxy among hundreds of billions of galaxies, all of which are in one universe among perhaps an infinite number of universes all nestled within a grand cosmic multiverse, is provincially insular and anthropocentrically blinkered. Which is more likely? That the universe was designed just for us, or that we see the universe as having been designed just for us? ↗

— Michael Shermer

#creation #darwinism #galaxies #intelligent-design #multiverse

The very comprehensibility of the world points to an intelligence behind the world. Indeed, science would be impossible if our intelligence were not adapted to the intelligibility of the world. The match between our intelligence and the intelligibility of the world is no accident. Nor can it properly be attributed to natural selection, which places a premium on survival and reproduction and has no stake in truth or conscious thought. Indeed, meat-puppet robots are just fine as the output of a Darwinian evolutionary process. ↗

— William A. Dembski

#chance #coincidence #consciousness #darwinism #evolution

In the abstract, it might be tempting to imagine that irreducible complexity simply requires multiple simultaneous mutations - that evolution might be far chancier than we thought, but still possible. Such an appeal to brute luck can never be refuted... Luck is metaphysical speculation; scientific explanations invoke causes. ↗

— Michael J. Behe

#chance #darwinism #evolution #id #intelligent-design