Ted

“It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them.”
― Ernest Hemingway, By-Line: Ernest Hemingway - Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades

“The trees around and overhead were so thick that it was always dry inside and on Sunday morning I lay there with Jonas, listening to his stories. All cat stories start with the statement: “My mother, who was the first cat, told me this,” and I lay with my head close to Jonas and listened.”
― Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle

“But how can a series of reasonable intermediate forms be constructed? Of what value could the first tiny step toward an eye be to its possessor? The dung-mimicking insect is well protected, but can there be any edge in looking only 5 percent like a turd?”
― Stephen Jay Gould, Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History

“Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods