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Great Quotations

Aydee_Aitchdee said:
Re-watched Connections a few weeks ago....

Does the cycle that goes, interest in something, involvement in it, tiring of it, and rejection of it, looking into something else, get shorter every decade?
--James Burke

… Any one of a million things could fail and cause our complex civilization to collapse for an hour, for a day, or however long. That's when you find out the extent to which you are reliant on technology and don't even know it. That's when you see that it's so interdependent, that if you take one thing away, the whole thing falls down and leaves you with nothing.
--James Burke
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Even nothing would lead us back to re-invent!
 
blessmycottonsocks said:
The following should resonate with all of us devotees of Forteana:

"We do not understand. We cannot understand. We are too finite to understand.
The really big things we cannot grasp as yet."

- Thomas Edison.
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Compare with:
Wir mussen wissen. Wir werden wissen. (We must know. We will know.)

David Hilbert
 
blessmycottonsocks said:
The following should resonate with all of us devotees of Forteana:

"We do not understand. We cannot understand. We are too finite to understand.
The really big things we cannot grasp as yet."

- Thomas Edison.
Click to expand...

The Donald Rumsfeld quotation resonated for me.

Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know.
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This!

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"Bowie was putting on his Zippy make-up and talking to his wife, Angie. He was behaving quite rationally, although he did say, 'Last night my mother saw her first spaceship."'

(D.A. Pennebaker)
 
https://www.theatlantic.com/books/a...e-anthem&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter

I.

Today I’ll listen to whatever music Spotify has in mind.
Concerto for Black Holes and Slime Molds by the Panty Sniffers?
That algorithm knows me so well! I’ve pitched myself under
this magnolia tree, heart first, before I get lobbed anyplace
worse. No more of grandpa’s stuffed marlin glaring at me
from the living-room wall, no more robocalls offering
to restructure debt never incurred, no more doomscrolling
(for the moment.) I’ve retreated to the bosom of nature,
where bird chirps whirr like sticks being fed into a wood
chipper and magnolia leaves clatter into my lap like leather
wings. Mari has flown off to Mexico. She believes in UFOs.
She wants to be called Marigold now, to leave her sad past
behind and bask in the mysteries of sex and drugs
and panhandling and side hustles and is that really so bad?

II.

It seems really bad, or at least alarming to me, though
I, too, was a hot mess in my twenties, so long ago,
in a different era and circumstance. I’m still a sunken
ship riddled with eels. I’ll admit that up front.
But, since I’m using Marigold’s travels and travails
as a thinly veiled excuse to blab about myself,
let’s get back to her. Marigold’s nose runs constantly.
She suffers from asthma and eczema. She loves animals,
toddlers, psychedelics, and girl bands. We share three
of these four loves, since I’ve been reduced by advancing
age to pretending I prefer booze to hallucinogens.
In the violent tides of her twenties, Marigold shed
the last of her baby fat, then graduated from stumbling
spiritual seeker to apprentice sensualist. She wants, she wants.

III.

She wants to spit in capitalism’s tea, impress older,
heavily tattooed fellow sensualists (the kinds that leave
teeth marks), kick patriarchy in the nut sack, darken
her hands with red and ochre dirts of other worlds,
learn five languages (but only by osmosis) while chasing
ninety-nine kinds of buzz and trying to pull free
from the tar pit of history. At her age, one is pure urge.
Life is a wildfire. So it’s no big sin that her bedroom
resembles a place where, among all their hoardings,
a pair of hoarders just staged a 24-hour wrestling match.
I just worry about her. Like I have the right, me,
who brims with wrongful convictions all day then tucks
herself into bed each night with ten stuffed animals
and an Ambien sandwich. So what am I trying to say?

IV.

Am I saying, Marigold, that in your attempts to enter
heaven you’re crashing the wrong gates? That I wish
you’d find life-guiding messages someplace other
than in sidewalk scatters of pollen? Oops, I do
that, not you. Clearly projection is one of my sins.
Maybe your determination to get lost is a valid response
to any decade in which people feel they’re about to be
vaporized daily. It’s a crippling time to be young.
I want the magnolia to reach down its branches
and hug me. My twenties were a rapturous tantrum
during which I aspired to be lady, tiger, and pirate
rolled into one. When I try to recall that madness,
it seems like it never really happened, or as if it did,
to someone, but I’m not sure I was ever there myself.


Amy Gerstler is the author of over a dozen poetry collections. She won the 1991 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry for Bitter Angel.
 
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Churchill has topped a poll of history's funniest insults with a famous jibe directed at either the socialist MP Bessie Braddock or the Conservative Lady Astor, the first female MP (depending on which version of the story you hear).

When accused by one of them of being 'disgustingly drunk' the Conservative Prime Minister responded: 'My dear, you are ugly, and what’s more, you are disgustingly ugly. But tomorrow I shall be sober and you will still be disgustingly ugly.'

It's unclear which of the two politicians Churchill directed his comment at - and there is even debate over whether he said it at all.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/...ll-of-history-s-funniest-insults-8878622.html
 
In WWll when asked whether he really needed two pastry cooks & couldn’t he spare one to serve in the war, Lord Chandos replied

“Dammit, can’t a man have a biscuit?"
 
"I would urge you not just to read good books, read terrible books too - because they can be more inspiring than the good books... A genuinely helpful reaction to something you’re reading is I could write this shit. That is immensely liberating.”
Alan Moore
 
'Spring always seems to one as if the flowers had been in hiding, and only came out into the sun because they were afraid that grown up people would grow tired of looking for them and give up the search.'

(Wilde)
 
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