Miriam > Miriam's Quotes

“Liquids require receptacles. This is the great problem of packaging, which every experienced chemist knows: and it was well known to God Almighty, who solved it brilliantly, as he is wont to, with cellular membranes- eggshells, the multiple peel of oranges, and our own skin, because after all we too are liquids. Now, at that time, there did not exist polyethylene, which would have suited me perfectly since it is flexible, light, and splendidly impermeable: but it is also a bit too incorruptible, and not by chance God Almighty himself, although he is a master of polymerization, abstained from patenting it: He does not like incorruptible things.”
― Primo Levi, The Periodic Table

“Now as Daly said, man-made capital and natural capital are not substitutable. This is obvious, but since most economists say they are substitutable, it has to be insisted on. Put simply, you can't substitute more sawmills for fewer forests. If you're building a house you can juggle the number of power saws and carpenters, which means they're substitutable, but you can't build it with half the amount of lumber, no matter how many saws or carpenters you have. Try it and you have a house of air. And that's where we live now.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars

“Aesthetics then is more than a philosophy or theory of art and beauty; it is a way of inhabiting space, a particular location, a way of looking and becoming. It is not organic. I grew up in an ugly house. No one there considered the function of beauty or pondered the use of space. Surrounded by dead things, whose spirits had long ago vanished since they were no longer needed, that house contained a great engulfing emptiness. In that house things were not to be looked at, they were to be possessed — space was not to be created but owned — a violent anti-aesthetic. I grew up thinking about art and beauty as it existed in our lives, the lives of poor black people. Without knowing the appropriate language, I understood that advanced capitalism was affecting our capacity to see, that consumerism began to take the place of that predicament of heart that called us to yearn for beauty. Now many of us are only yearning for things.”
― bell hooks, Belonging: A Culture of Place

“In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded.”
― Terry Pratchett, Lords and Ladies

“To oppose something is to maintain it.
They say here "all roads lead to Mishnory." To be sure, if you turn your back on Mishnory and walk away from it, you are still on the Mishnory road. To oppose vulgarity is inevitably to be vulgar. You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk in a different road.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Hocus Pocus

“This is the derivation of that old Yankee proverb that if you can sell a book, you can move sixty tons of weaponry three hundred miles in winter”
― Sarah Vowell

“He asked me to prepare semolina for forty people, saying that they were workers at his farm," his mother remembered. "In fact they were Islamists, but I could not refuse them.”
― Joshua Hammer, The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu and Their Race to Save the World’s Most Precious Manuscripts

“A stream of urine jetted outward in a precise curve, guided by the two fingers she would have inserted between her labia. Arcing liquid caught the dying sunlight to glow a soft and glittering tangerine. The woman pulled her hand free and shook it. She put the fingers into her mouth, sucked meditatively.”
― Nalo Hopkinson, Midnight Robber

“Already it was clear that the lower floors were doomed. Even their insistence on educating their children, the last reflex of any exploited group before it sank into submission, marked the end of their resistance.”
― J.G. Ballard

“Ini and Aevi were entranced by his description of a curriculum that included farming, cparnetry, sewage reclamation, printing, plumbing, road mending, playwriting, and al the other occupations of the adult community, and by his admission that nobody was ever punished for anything.
“Though sometimes,” he said, “they make you go away by yourself for a while.”
“But what,” Oiie said abruptly, as if the question, long kept back, burst from him under pressure, “what keeps people in order? Why don’t they rob and murder each other?”
“Nobody owns anything to rob. If you want things you take them from the depository,. As for violence, well, I don’t know, Oiie; would you mruder me, ordinarily? And if you felt like it, would a law against it stop you? Coercsion is the least efficient means of obtaining order.”
“All right, but how do you et peopled to do the dirty work?”
“What dirty work?” asked Oiie’s wife, not following.
“Garbage collecting, grave digging,” Oiie said. Sheik added, “Mercury mining,” and nearly said, “Shit processing,” but recollected the Ioti taboo on scatological words. He had reflected, quite early in his stay on Urras, that the Urasti lived among mountains of excrement, but never mentioned shit.
“Well, we all do them. But nobody has to do them for very long, unless he likes the work. One day in each decade the community management committee or the block committee or whoever needs you can ask you to join in such work; they make rotating lists. Then the disagreeable work postings, or ‘dangerous ones like the mercury mines and mills, normally they’re for one half year only.”
“But then the whole personal must consist of people just learning the job.”
“Yes. It’s not efficient, but what else is to be done? You can’t tell a man to work on a job that will cripple him or kill him in a few years. Why should he do that?”
“He can refuse the order?”
“It’s not an order, Oiie. He goes to Divlab- the Division of Labor office- and says, I want to do such and such, what have you got? And they tell him where there are jobs.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

“She was so elaborately and ostentatiously a female body that she seemed scarcely to be a human being.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

“Interruptions were sometimes more frequent than statements. The process, compared to a well-managed executive conference, was a slab of raw beef compared to a wiring diagram. Raw beef, however, functions better than a wiring diagram would, in its place — inside a living animal.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

“Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: 'You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself — educating your own judgements. Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society.”
― Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook

“...The duty of the individual is to accept No rule, t be the intitiator of his own acts, to be responsible. Only if he does so will the society live, and change, and adapt, and survive. We are not subjects of a State founded upon law, but membrs ofa society foudned upon revolution. Revolution is our obligationl our hope of evolution. The Revolution is in the individual spirit, or it is nowhere. It is for all, or it is nothing. If it seen as having any end, it will never truly being.' We can't stop here. We must go on. We must take the risks”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

“You need other people to let you know whether you're communicating what you think you are and whether you're doing it in ways that are not only accessible and entertaining, but as compelling as you can make them.”
― Octavia Butler

“Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

“The dampness and the rain are hastening the destruction of these and many other manuscripts," Haidara told me. "They should be returned to Timbuktu as quickly as possible," The drier air in Timbuktu acted as a kind of safeguard against fungal rot, though the arid climate of his hometown was also deleterious over time, causing unprotected pages to grow brittle and fall apart. " We have begun to see... mold, mildew, and fungus on paper and also on leather bindings.”
― Joshua Hammer, The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu and Their Race to Save the World’s Most Precious Manuscripts

“I took a step toward her. "It is my right to reside in my own mind. It is my right," I said. "It is my right to be unsociable and it is my right to be unpleasant to be around. Do you ever listen to yourself? This is crazy, that is crazy, everything is crazy to you. By whose measure? Well, it is my right to be crazy, as you love to say so much. I have no shame. I have felt many things in my life, but shame is not among them." The volume of my voice caused me to stand on my tiptoes. I could not remember yelling like this, ever. "You may think that I have an obligation to you but I assure you that us being thrown together in this arbitrary arrangement does not cohesion make. I have never had less of an obligation to anyone in my life, you aggressively ordinary woman.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties: Stories

“...(T)he last rebels of the Tuareg uprising that had devastated the north for half a decade agreed to lay down their weapons, and the nomadic warriors surrendered thousands of Kalashnikov rifles to the government. The weapons were buried tin the concrete pedestal f a "monument of Peace" that sits on a rise on Timbuktu's outskirts- an assemblage of interlocking archways surrounded by colorful murals of Malian government soldiers and Tuareg rebels shaking hands and burning their weapons.”
― Joshua Hammer, The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu and Their Race to Save the World’s Most Precious Manuscripts

“Broward had been vilified by modern environmentalists for his intense assautl on the everglades, but he was considered a staunch conversvationist in his day. he supported strict laws to protect fish, game, birds, and oysters, and his top priority was the reclamation of a swamp for agriculture and envelopment. Brossard never stopped to think what draining the Everglades might do to the fish, game, birds, and oysters that lived there, but hardly anyone did. The conservationist John Giford dedicated his book of Everglades essays to Broward, explaining that “the man who makes two blades of grass grow where only one grew before is the proverbial public benefactor, bu the man who inaugurates a movement to render 3,000,000 acres of waste land highly productive deserves endless commendation.”
Broward was also a progressive- an anti railroad, anti corporation, anti-Flagler populist. His crusade for Everglades drainage was not just a fight for man against nature; it was a fight for ordinary Floridians angst’s the “seductive and enslaving power of corporate interests” who monopolized state lands without improving them. Flagler and other railroad barons, he complained, were “draining the people instead of the swamps” At a time when the richest one percent of Americans owned halfthe nation’s wealth, when forty-two corporate trusts controlled at least 70 percent of their industries, Broward wanted to turn the Everglades into a place where ordinary people could deprive their lot in life through hard work. That’s what he had done.”
― Michael Grunwald, The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise

“Once again the lake slammed through the dike like a truck driving through puddling, sending a fifteen-foot-high tsunami through the upper Glades, drawing the towns of Miami Locks, South Bay, Chosen, Pahokee, and Belle Glade, where the Glades Hotel was the only building left standing after the storm.”
― Michael Grunwald

“This was a new way of thinking about national parks. “I have been laboring under the impression that the yardstick to use in selecting national parks ws that of the showman, that it was the spectacular we were to consider,” one congressman told Fairchild, the founder of Miami’s Fairchild Tropical Gardens. “Now you were giving us a new thought, and a very interesting one, that a piece of ground which has educational value, scientific value, rises to the heigh of national park value.”
― Michael Grunwald, The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise

“Coe’s expansive boundaries encompassed more than two million acres of the southern Everglades, Florida Bay, Ten Thousand Islands, Big Cypress, and the upper Keys, stretching as far north as fifteen miles above the Tamiami Trail highway and as far east as the barrier reefs in the Atlantic. The primary goa was the preserve the ecosystems’ vast diversity of habitats in their primitive condition- pinelands and marshlands, estuaries and sloughs, dwarf cypress and elk horn coral. A secondary goal was half a million annual visitors, buts the botanist David Fairchild explained at a congresisonal hearing, the Everglades was not Yosemite, and its entertainment value would be only part of its appeal. It would also educate children, provide a unique laboratory for scientists, protect rare flora and fauna from extinction, and “Startle Americans out of the runs which an exclusive association with he human animal produces in the mind of man.”
― Michael Grunwald, The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise

“…”this is the wish of the majority of the people. The aesthetic appeal of the Park can never be as strong as the demands of home and livelihood. The manatee and the orchids mean something to people in an abstract way, but he former can’t line their purse, nor the latter fill their empty bellies.”
― Michael Grunwald, The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise

“...with the unblinking assumption, that science has cornered the market on truth and there's not much room for discussion. Undeterred, we carried on. The basket makers had given us the prerequisites of the scientific method: observation, pattern, and a testable hypothesis. That sounded like science to me. So we began by setting up experimental plots in the meadows to ask the plants the question "Do these two different harvest methods contribute to decline" And then we tried to detect their answer.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

“Leopold would have mourned mans’ brutalization of the wilderness even if he believed it was economically and ecologically sustainable- he believed that man’s ability to mourn this brutalization was what set him apart form the beasts-bt he also noticed that the destruction of natural ecosystems often had harmful consequences for people.”
― Michael Grunwald, The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise

“if you don’t synthesize knowledge, scientific journals become spare-arts catalogues for machines that are never built,” he explained. “I am as good a diagnostician of ecosystems as any doctor is of human beings, and I’m not on any damn ego trip when I say that. Sometimes I wish I did’t have the knowledge hat I do, because I can get pretty damn glum.”
― Michael Grunwald, The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise

“millions of dollars have been spent over issues that could have been settled by men and women of good intentions”
― Michael Grunwald, The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise