Scott Huler > Quotes

“So wait a minute. I go looking for the story of the guy who wrote this awesome wind scale tha tblew my mind. I start reading about his life, and before he's sixteen years old I've already run across a family's flight from the poorhouse, an early balloon flight, an eccentric father, a young man at sea, Malay pirates, shipwreck, castaways, buried treasure, and Captain Bligh, fresh off the mutiny on the Bounty. Not a single word about the wind, but honestly, at this point, who cares?”
― Scott Huler, Defining the Wind: The Beaufort Scale and How a 19th-Century Admiral Turned Science into Poetry

“All organisms can make the most basic distinctions--between food and not-food, danger and safety, light and dark, same-species and not-same. But only people can use language to make the highly complex categorizations of, say, animals or physical forces, or however many different kinds of quarks there are now, putting them in separate piles and naming the piles. It's how we proceed; it's how we communicate. Organization into categories is, at bottom, human.”
― Scott Huler, Defining the Wind: The Beaufort Scale and How a 19th-Century Admiral Turned Science into Poetry

“To describe the wind, you do the opposite: you look at everything else. It's mind-expanding.”
― Scott Huler

“Weeping is the emotion of middle age. Once you get to your forties, no joy fails to remind you of its opposite, or its cost, or those not present to share it; no sorrow fails to get its due. To weep is to be human, to be alive, to have grown up.”
― Scott Huler, No-Man's Lands: One Man's Odyssey Through The Odyssey