They said that Charles Addams slept in a coffin and drank martinis with eyeballs in them.
Fourteen years later, in 2002, Tee herself came to rest beside Charlie in the secular graveyard where the possums and the fishers sing.
Linda Davis, Charles Addams
Is it not naïve to set forth on a general exploration of lying and truth-telling?
They can thrive only on a foundation of respect for veracity.
Sisselia Bok, Lying
The year 2003 will be remembered as a time when America lost its dietary senses.
In the matter of fats, we truly are what we eat and what we eat truly matters.
Susan Allport, The Queen of Fats
Economists agree on more than is commonly understood.
The cure would restore the health of economics, disguised now under the neuroses of an artificial methodology of science.
Donald McCloskey, The Rhetoric of Economics
Not long before our nation launched the invasion of Iraq, our longest-serving senator, Robert Byrd of West Virginia, stood on the Senate floor and said: “This Chamber is, for the most part, silent—ominously, dreadfully silent.
Our choice is clear.
Al Gore, The Assault on Reason
The custom of drinking orange juice with breakfast is not very widespread, taking the world as a whole, and it is thought by many peoples to be a distinctly American habit.
“It was inside of oranges a few minutes ago.”
John McPhee, Oranges
Zero hit the USS Yorktown like a torpedo.
The universe begins and ends with zero.
Charles Seife, Zero
You watch an ant in a meadow, laboriously climbing up a blade of grass, higher and higher until it falls, then climbs again, and again, like Sisyphus rolling his rock, always striving to reach the top.
It will be fascinating to see what institutions and projects our children will devise, building on the foundations earlier generations have built and preserved for them, to carry us all safely into the future.
Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell
It was a bad time.
“Maybe so.”
Tim O'Brien, Going After Cacciato
This book is about human inference and human error.
If social scientists are to be worthy of the role that we advocate, they must specify when they are speaking as formal scientists and when they are speaking only as intuitive scientists.
Richard Nisbitt and Lee Ross, Human Inference
The white Cadillac rolled up the curving pebbled driveway, passed the brightly lighted clubhouse, and went around to the parking lot in the rear of the country club.
Hand-in-hand we went down the drive to the car.
Dan Marlowe, Never Live Twice
Political debates in the United States are routinely framed as a battle between conservatives who favor market outcomes, whatever they may be, against liberals who prefer government intervention to ensure that families have decent standards-of-living.
This framing would be fine if the point is to simply show up and be the perennial losers of national politics, but if the point is to actually change the world in a way that makes it better for the bulk of the population, then we must be prepared to move beyond the ideology of the conservative nanny state.
Dean Baker, The Conservative Nanny State
Children are not rugged individualists.
The villiage we built with them in mind will be a better place for us all.
Hillary Clinton, It Takes a Village
On the 28 June 1992 President Mitterrand of France made a sudden, unannounced and unexpected appearance in Sarajevo, already the centre of a Balkan war that was to cost perhaps 150,000 lives during the remainder of the year.
And the price of failure, that is to say, the alternative to a changed society, is darkness.
Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes
People don't read the morning newspaper, Marshall McLuhan once said, they slip into it like a warn bath.
With what sniggers, laughter, and good-humored amazement they will look back upon the era of the Painted Word!
Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word
It is a melancholy experience for a professional mathematician to find himself writing about mathematics.
The case for my life, then, or for that of any one else who has been a mathematician in the same sense which I have been one, is this: that I have added something to knowledge, and helped others add more; and that these somethings have a value which differs in degree only, and not in kind from that of the creations of the great mathematicians, or of any of the other artists, great or small, who have left some kind of memorial behind them.
G. H. Hardy, A Mathematician's Apology
The job progress sheet in the office says the weather is clear, with a high for the day of 54 and a low of 40, which is fine to keep work moving along this $19,000,000 stadium New York City is having built alongside its World's Fair grounds.
When was the last time you won anything out of life?
Jimmy Breslin, Can't Anybody Here Play This Game?
Even before you think about “index funds”—in their most basic form, mutual funds that simply buy all the stocks in the U.S. stock market and hold them forever—you must understand how the market actually works.
You will be a winner if you follow the simple commonsense guidelines in this little book.
John Bogle, The Little Book of Commonsense Investing
He parked in sunglare on a steep narrow street whose cracked white cement was seamed with tar.
And, well, what else would you suggest a young lady wear for a cruise on a warm summer night?
Joseph Hanson, Skinflick
Computers are everywhere.
The transformation we are concerned with is not a technical one, but a continuing evolution of how we understand our surroundings and ourselves—of how we continue becoming the beings that we are.
Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores, Understanding Computers and Cognition
The Proper Villain slowed them down.
As I watched the Senator fall, I wondered what the weather would be in like in Dubrovnik.
Ross Thomas, Yellow-Dog Contract
In the spring of 1941, as world war loomed, I was in second grade at Public School Number 12 in Bayonne, New Jersey.
Rather, thanks to science, humanity is in control and defines its own purpose.
Victor Stenger, Has Science Found God?
The doors of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre emptied another audience into the mean rain that always seems to know the minute the performance ended.
It made a small arc of light, and then dimmed and went out, its brightness falling from air.
Martha Grimes, The Dirty Duck
He lived in a grey shadowy street in Vienna two flights up behind four dirt stained never opened windows.
Like
A summer fly
Waltzes out
And wobbles
In the winter.
J.P. Donleavey, The Saddest Summer of Samual S
The history of opium is a major theme in modern Chinese history.
Opium is a fruitful optic through which to look at China's capacity and complexity.
Zhang Yangwen, The Social Life of Opium in China
“Are we going to scuffle?” my mother is asking my father.
It's the only one they ever have to tell me, and the only one I ever want to hear: come anything, they wish me well.
Thomas McMahon, Principles of American Nuclear Chemistry: A Novel
Roughly one hundred million Americans must work for a living.
To do less shortchanges our future.
Richard Edwards, Contested Terrain
Viruses compete by being as small and as adaptable as possible.
The world is Unix, Unix is the world, laboring ceaselessly for the salvation of all sentient beings.
Simson Garfinkel, Daniel Weise, and Steven Strassmann, The UNIX-HATERS Handbook
She copes.
They'll have it when she gets home.
Roddy Doyle, Paula Spencer
The late summer evening was hot and heavy.
“In the name of Allah,” the young Arab said slowly, “the Compassionate, the Merciful.”
Janwillem van de Wetering, The Corpse on the Dike
The meaning of art is no longer self-evident in our society.
We have already accepted that idea where science is concerned, and almost certainly, in the years ahead, we shall come to accept it in contemporary art as well.
Shuichi Kato, Form, Style, Tradition
On that crisp blue Tuesday morning I got the news, as most did, by phone.
A story on The New York Sun's Web site concerning a court filing submitted the previous day by Patrick Fitzgerald reveals that according to Scooter Libby's grand jury testimony, President Bush authorized Libby (through Vice President Chaney) to leak classified information about prewar intelligence.
Frank Rich, The Greatest Story Ever Sold
Honey phoned her sister-in-law Muriel, still living in Harlan County, Kentucky, to tell her she'd left Walter Schoen, calling him Valter, and was on her way to being Honey Deal again.
“You gonna tell her about Honey walking around in her high heels, naked?”
Elmore Leonard, Up In Honey's Room
Mostly, she was a woman who loved scandal—and lived by it.
And now that I've thought it through, to hell with it.
Jim Thompson, The Kill-Off
It was a museum, in a way like any other, this Musée de l'Homme, Museum of Man, situated on a pleasant eminence with, from the restaurant plaza in back, a splendid view of the Eiffel Tower.
Perhaps our descendants in those remote times will look back on us, on the long and wandering journey the human race will have taken from its dimly remembered origins on the distant planet Earth, and recollect our personal and collective histories, our romance with science and religion, with clarity and understanding and love.
Carl Sagan, Broca's Brain
When a new bridge between two sovereign states of the United States has been completed, it is time for speech.
“And don't forget to cut the fucking deck.”
Edward Abbey, The Monkey Wrench Gang
It is still midmorning in Malawi when we arrive at a small village, Nthandire, about an hour outside of Lilongwe, the capital.
Let the future say of our generation that we sent forth mighty currents of hope, and that we worked together to heal the world.
Jeffery Sachs, The End of Poverty
She wore jeans, high-top work shoes, an old pullover with a jagged reindeer pattern.
And officer Zara answered the phone.
Joseph Hansen, Troublemaker
Roarty was making an omelette with the mushrooms Eamonn Eales had collected in Davy Long's park that morning.
‘I might take you up on that,’ said Potter.
Patrick McGinley, Bogmail
In a not altogether unworthy verse, Edmund Clerihew Bentley had the following to say about a major practitioner of economics — or political economy, as the subject used to be called:
John Stuart Mill
By a mighty effort of will
Overcame his natural bonhomie
And wrote ‘Principles of Political Economy’.
I have argued that the rewards can be expected to be rather large.
Amartya Sen, On Ethics & Economics
In the 1950s, Chagrin Falls, Ohio, was the kind of place where Americans believed that Father Knows Best patriarch Jim Anderson could raise Kitten, Bud, and Princess in a big fine home with total comfort and domestic bliss on an insurance agent's salary.
He was, as Michael O'Donoghue said, “A big American jerk—in the best sense of the word.”
Josh Karp, A Futile and Stupid Gesture
The headlamps of the car picked her out through the fog and the rain; she was standing on the shoulder about a hundred yards from the cafe, her backpack on the ground beside her.
Nat heard the explosion, felt nothing, saw a terrible white glare—stars showering like meteors, moon breaking like a mirror, raincoat flying down the strand.
Martha Grimes, I am the Only Running Footman
I was working the hole with the sailor and we did not do bad.
And being blind may not refuse to hear: “Mr. Bradley Mr. Martin, disaster to my blood whom I created”—(the shallow water came in with the tide and the Swedish River of Gothenburg.)
William S. Burroughs, The Soft Machine
Coal and diamonds, sand and computer chips, cancer and healthy tissue: throughout history, variations in the arrangement of atoms have distinguished the cheap from the cherished, the diseased from the healthy.
By your answers you will tell once more the tale of how the future was won.
K. Eric Drexler, Engines of Creation
The illustration in front of the reader should explain much more quickly than I could in words what is here meant by the “riddle of style.”
In teaching us to see the visible world afresh, he gives us the illusion of looking into the invisible realms of the mind—if only we know, as Philostratus says, how to use our eyes.
Ernst Gombrich, Art and Illusion
Promptly at eight o'clock a patrician figure in his thirties was shown to his regular table in the Palm Room of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.
And to the end of his days, Tesla the pacifist hoped that such knowledge would be used, not for war among Earthlings, but for interplanetary communication with our neighbors in space, of whose existence he felt certain.
Margaret Cheney, Tesla: Man out of Time
In a culture like ours, long accustomed to splitting and dividing all things as a means of control, it is sometimes a bit of a shock to be reminded that, in operational and practical fact, the medium is the message.
Panic about automation as a threat of uniformity on a world scale is the projection into the future of mechanical standardization and specialism, which are now past.
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media
Everyone has heard people quarrelling.
But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.
C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
The female protagonist in the first section is a woman of forty-eight, German: she is five foot six inches tall, weighs 133 pounds (in indoor clothing), i.e., only twelve to fourteen ounces below standard weight; her eyes are iridescent dark blue and black, her slightly graying hair, very thick and blond, hangs loosely to her shoulders, sheathing her head like a helmet.
Well, there remain the “still unexplained reflections,” there also remain some dark thunderclouds of foreboding in the background: Mehmet's jealousy, and his recently announced aversion to ballroom dancing.
Heinrich Böll, Group Portrait with Lady
The idea of equality is confronted by two different types of diversities: (1) the basic heterogeneity of human beings and (2) the multiplicity of variables in terms of which equality can be judged.
The analysis has been very substantially motivated by that connection.
Amartya Sen, Inequality Reexamined
Not marching in the fields of Trasimene
Where Mars did mate the warlike
Carthagens,
Nor sporting in the dalliance of love
In courts of kings
where state is overturned,
Nor in the pomp of proud audacious deeds
Intends our muse to vaunt his heavenly verse.
Faustus is gone: regard his hellish fall,
Whose fiendful fortune may
exhort the wise
Only to wonder at unlawful things,
Whose deepness doth
entice such forward wits
To practice more than heavenly power permits.
Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus
Louis Isidore Kahn was born on 20 February 1901 on the Baltic island of Saaremaa (formerly called Ösel) in Estonia, on the coastal edge of imperial Russia.
In the end, Kahn's architecture is about inhabitation, and must be experienced; in its profound engagement of the immeasurable, Kahn's work admirably embodies Emerson's cautionary aphorism that in matters of the spirit, ‘No answer in words can reply to a question of things.’
Robert McCarter, Louis I Kahn
Exactly three months before the killing at Martingale Mrs. Maxie gave a dinner party.
And when that happened the right words would be found.
P.D. James, Cover Her Face
In considering how to conduct the schooling of our young, adults have two problems to solve.
My faith is that school will endure since no one has invented a better way to introduce the young to the world of learning; that the public school will endure since no one has invented a better way to create a public; and that childhood will survive because without it we must lose our sense of what it means to be an adult.
Neil Postman, The End of Education
Nothing is more mysterious and elusive than time.
I think it may even be the story of the universe.
Julian Barbour, The End of Time
In his time Francis Pettigrew has aspired to, and even applied for, a number of appointments of different kinds.
With deep distaste he opened the book and read from the late secretary's neat script: “At a meeting held at Mrs. Basset's house on the 15th of July …”.
Cyril Hare, When the Wind Blows
The purpose of this study is to explore how a sequence of growth theorists, beginning in the middle of the eighteenth century and stretching up to the present day, chose to deal (or not deal) with an array of variables and problems that are, in my view, inevitably posed by the dynamics of economic growth.
In a sense we are jugglers; but like the medieval Jongleur de Notre Dame, we must make sure we juggle for large purpose.
Walter Rostow, Theories of Economic Growth from David Hume to the Present
In the summer of 2001, long before his reelection and even before he became a “wartime president,” George W. Bush found himself in a political tight spot.
If it will not come to its senses, we must cast it aside.
Chris Mooney, The Republican War on Science
To someone like myself, whose literary activities have been confined since 1920 mainly to such pedestrian genres as legal briefs (in connection with my position as partner in the firm of Andrews, Bishop, & Andrews) and Inquiry-writing (which I'll explain presently), the hardest thing about the task at hand—viz., the explanation of a day in 1937 when I changed my mind—is getting into it.
This decided, I made a note to intercept my note to Jimmy Andrews, stubbed out my cigar, and without hesitation went downstairs to telephone the Macks, ignoring with a smile the absurd thunderstorm that just then broke over Cambridge.
John Barth, The Floating Opera
Living in the information age can occasionally feel like being driven by someone with tunnel vision.
We only know that solutions will be much harder to find if we drive at the problems with tunnel vision—if, to repeat our long list, peripheries and margins, practices and communities, organizations and institutions are left out or swept out of consideration.
John Brown and Paul Duguid, The Social Life of Information
About thirty years ago, Miss Maria Ward of Huntingdon, with only seven thousand pounds, had the good luck to captivate Sir Thomas Bertram, of Mansfield Park, in the county of Northampton, and to be thereby raised to the rank of a baronet's lady, with all the comforts and consequences of an hansom house and large income.
On that event they removed to Mansfield, and the parsonage there, which under each of its two former owners, Fanny had never been able to approach but with some painful sensation of restraint or alarm, soon grew as dear to her heart, and as thoroughly perfect in her eyes, as every thing else, within the view and patronage of Mansfield Park, had long been.
Jane Austen, Mansfield Park
This book offers a novel look at the conditions of the anarchic world community in which we live, a look reasonably free of the illusions buttressing liberal complacency.
Thus may be realized the ultimate promise of the world revolution of Westernization.
Theodore Von Laue, The World Revolution of Westernization
There was a map of Vietnam on the wall of my apartment in Saigon and some nights, coming back late to the city, I'd lie out on my bed and look at it, too tired to do anything more than just get my boots off.
And no moves left for me at all but to write down some few last words and make the dispersion, Vietnam Vietnam Vietnam, we've all been there.
Michael Herr, Dispatches
The call came into the Midtown North squad at 2340 hours on October 17, 1991, just as detectives were packing it in for the night.
Detectives share a remarkable sense of occupational solidarity that binds them one to another, and to other police officers, in a brotherhood of secret knowledge, duty, risk, and, sometimes, death.
Robert Jackall, Street Stories
It was a tool like no other.
“I do.”
Rubem Fonseca, High Art
After decades of believing in their economic invulnerability, Americans were jolted by the 1973–74 Arab oil embargo.
If we cannot learn, or prefer to pretend that the zero-sum problem does not exist, we are simply going to fail.
Lester Thurow, The Zero-Sum Society
Much of the philosophy of technology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was done without consideration of or involvement with the philosophy of science.
Do you think a case can be made for the claim that the “efficiency” of technological devices is a social construction and not simply a matter of measuring input and output in terms of physical quantities?
Val Dusek, Philosophy of Technology
An easterly is the most disagreeable wind in Lyme Bay—Lyme Bay being that largest byte from the underside of England's outstretched southwestern leg—and a person of curiosity could at once have deduced several strong probabilities about the pair who began to walk down the quay at Lyme Regis, the small but ancient eponym of the inbite, one incisively sharp and blustery morning in the late March of 1867.
And out again, upon the unplumb'd, salt, enstranging sea.
John Fowles, The French Lieutenant's Woman
Ever since childhood, when I lived within earshot of the Boston and Maine, I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it.
The trip is finished and so is the book, and in a moment I will turn to the first page, and to amuse myself on the way to London will read with some satisfaction the trip that begins, Ever since childhood, when I lived within earshot of the Boston and Maine, I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it…
Paul Theroux, The Great Railway Bazaar
In early nineteenth-century America, business enterprises were generally small, family affairs.
If my main purpose has been to understand the relationships among the communication system, managerial theory, and communication technology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a secondary purpose has been to study and interpret historical events they may illuminate current problems and issues.
JoAnne Yates, Control through Communication
My name is George Smith.
Good news
In the sweet
By and by.
J.P. Donleavy, A Singular Man
On a warm summer day just six months into the new millennium, humankind crossed a bridge into a momentous new era.
The need to succeed at these endeavors is just one more compelling reason why the current battles between the scientific and spiritual worldviews need to be resolved—we desperately need both voices to be at the table, and not to be shouting at each other.
Francis S. Collins, The Language of God
At different times in our history, different cities have been the focal point of a radiating American spirit.
For in the end, he was trying to tell us what afflicted the people in Brave New World was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking.
Neal Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death
Little Billy Twillig stepped aboard a Sony 747 bound for a distant land.
It made no sound, or none that he could hear, laughing as he was, alternately blank and shadow-banded, producing as he was this noise resembling laughter, expressing vocally what appeared to be a compelling emotion, crying out as he was, grasping into the stillness, emitting as he was this series of involuntary shrieks, particles bouncing in the air around him, the reproductive dust of existence.
Don DeLillo, Ratner's Star
On March 23, 1983,President Reagan announced that after consultation with the Joint Chiefs of Staff he had decided to embark on a long-range research-and-development effort to counter the threat of Soviet ballistic missiles and to make these nuclear weapons “impotent and obsolete.”
As always, for the Republican right, the goal was weapons in space—that is, weapons which, if they materialized, could contribute to an offense as well as provide a defense for the United States.
Frances FitzGerald, Way Out There In The Blue
Now single up all lines!
They fly toward grace.
Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day
In the colony I'm known as Doctor Rat.
Going along the sidewalk, dragging my tail.
William Kotzwinkle, Doctor Rat
We reveal ourselves in the metaphors we choose for depicting the cosmos in miniature.
He began these final lines with the best epitome of all: “There is grandeur in this view of life.”
Stephen Jay Gould, Full House
Harry Johnson lit another cigarette, flipped his lighter shut and said, “You're not convinced, I can see. I'm not joking.”
That, he tossed in the gutter.
Martha Grimes, The Old Wine Shades
This page last modified on 1 April 2008.