Alfred Lord Tennyson
- In Memoriam, Section 123
There rolls the deep where grew the tree. O earth, what changes hast thou seen! There where the long street roars, hath been the stillness of the central sea. The hills are shadows, and they flow from form to form, and nothings stands; they melt like mist, the solid lands, like clouds they shape themselves and go.
Thomas Pynchon
- Proverbs for Paranoids (Gravity's Rainbow)
If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers. You hide, they seek. Paranoids are not paranoids because they're paranoid, but because they keep putting themselves, idiots, deliberately into paranoid situations.
Peter Norvig
- On Chomsky and the Two Cultures of Statistical Learning
As in Plato's allegory of the cave, Chomsky thinks we should focus on the ideal, abstract forms that underlie language, not on the superficial manifestations of language that happen to be perceivable in the real world. That is why he is not interested in language performance. But Chomsky, like Plato, has to answer where these ideal forms come from.
Peter Norvig
- On Chomsky and the Two Cultures of Statistical Learning
Why is the moon at the right distance to provide a gentle tide and exert a stabilizing effect on the earth's axis of rotation, thus protecting life here? Why does gravity work the way it does? Why does anything at all exist rather than not exist? O'Reilly is correct that these questions can only be addressed by mythmaking, religion or philosophy, not by science.
Herman Melville
- Moby Dick
With the landless gull, that at sunset folds her wings and is rocked to sleep between billows; so at nightfall, the Nantucketer, out of sight of land, furls his sails, and lays him to his rest, while under his very pillow rush herds of walruses and whales.
Herman Melville
- Moby Dick
To enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself. If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable anymore.
Margaret Atwood
- Everybody is Happy Now
Alone among the animals, we suffer from the future perfect tense. Rover the Dog cannot imagine a future world of dogs in which all fleas will have been eliminated and doghood will finally have achieved its full glorious potential. But thanks to our uniquely structured languages, human beings can imagine such enhanced states for themselves, though they can also question their own grandiose constructions.
Ian Hill
- 2005 Interview with Stuff.co.nz
Loads of the things in that movie have actually happened to us. We've gotten lost several times between the dressing rooms and the stage in big venues. We've had loads of really demented drummers leave in strange ways. We've had tour buses break down in the middle of nowhere, and we've had stage sets turn up that are way too small because we got the scale wrong. So yeah, we are 'Spinal Tap', I suppose.
Alan Moore
- Blinded by the Hype: An Affectionate Character Assassination
Probably the most remarkable thing that Stan Lee achieved was the way in which he managed to hold on to his audience long after they had grown beyond the age range usually associated with comic book readers of that period. He did this by constant application of change, modification and development.
Fredrick Douglass
- April 1888 Speech
When a great truth once gets abroad in the world, no power on earth can imprison it, or prescribe its limits, or suppress it. It is bound to go on until it becomes the thought of the world. Such a truth is woman's right to equal liberty with man. She was born with it.
Soren Kierkegaard
- In Vino Veritas
So long as one is a child one possesses sufficient imagination to maintain one's soul at the very top-notch of expectation - for a whole hour in the dark room, if need be; but when one has grown older one's imagination may easily cause one to tire of the Christmas tree before seeing it.
Soren Kierkegaard
- Diapsalmata
What is a poet? An unhappy man who carries profound anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so fashioned that when sighs and groans pass over them they sound like beautiful music.
David Foster Wallace
- Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage
I submit that it is indisputably easier to be dogmatic than Democratic, especially about issues that are both vexed and highly charged. I submit further that the issues surrounding "correctness" in contemporary American usage are both vexed and highly charged, and that the fundamental questions they involve are ones whose answers have to be "worked out" instead of simply found.
David Foster Wallace
- Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage
There are lots of epithets for people like this - Grammar Nazis, Usage Nerds, Syntax Snobs, the Language Police. The term I was raised with is Snoot. The word might be slightly self-mocking, but those other terms are outright dysphemisms. A Snoot can be defined as somebody who knows what dysphemism means and doesn't mind letting you know it.
Robert Falcon Scott
- Last Letter (to Sir Francis Bridgeman)
I fear we have shipped up - a close shave. I am writing a few letters which I hope will be delivered some day. I want to thank you for the friendship you gave me of late years, and to tell you how extraordinarily pleasant I found it to serve under you. I want to tell you I was not too old for this job. It was the younger men that went under first.
Robert Falcon Scott
- Message to the Public
We are weak, writing is difficult, but for my own sake I do not regret this journey, which has shown that Englishmen can endure hardships, help one another, and meet death with as great a fortitude as ever in the past. We took risks, we knew we took them; things have come out against us, and therefore we have no cause for complaint, but bow to the will of Providence, determined still to do our best to the last.
Joseph Conrad
- Lord Jim
There are many shades in the danger of adventures and gales, and it is only now and then that there appears on the face of facts a sinister violence of intention - that indefinable something which forces it upon the mind and the heart of a man, that this complication of accidents or these elemental furies are coming at him with a purpose of malice, with a strength beyond control, with an unbridled cruelty that means to tear out of him his hope and fear.
