Cosmic Arcata

“Of all games in the world, the one most universally and eternally popular is the game of school. You collect six children and put them on a doorstep, while you walk up and down with the book and cane. Only one thing mars it: the tendency of one and all of other six children to clamour for their turn with the book and cane. The reason, I am sure, that journalism is so popular a calling, in spite of its many drawbacks, is this: each journalist feels he is the boy walking up and down with the cane. The Government, the Classes, and the Masses, Society, Art, and Literature, are the other children sitting on the doorstep.

[published in 1900]”
― Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men on the Bummel

“Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.”
― J.D. Salinger

“The problem is not that Afghans unite and then cannot be conquered; the problem is that Afghans fragment and then cannot be governed”
― Tamim Ansary, Games Without Rules: The Often Interrupted History of Afghanistan

“Maybe, kneeling down to atoms, they're becoming atom-sized in their souls. Maybe a specialist is only a coward, afraid to look out of his little cage. And think what any specialist misses--the whole world over his fence.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden