Sasha

“I find many adults are put off when young children pose scientific questions. Why is the Moon round? the children ask. Why is grass green? What is a dream? How deep can you dig a hole? When is the world’s birthday? Why do we have toes? Too many teachers and parents answer with irritation or ridicule, or quickly move on to something else: ‘What did you expect the Moon to be, square?’ Children soon recognize that somehow this kind of question annoys the grown-ups. A few more experiences like it, and another child has been lost to science. Why adults should pretend to omniscience before 6-year-olds, I can’t for the life of me understand. What’s wrong with admitting that we don’t know something? Is our self-esteem so fragile?”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“Ike and Tina Turner’s “River Deep-Mountain High,” his most ambitious record, with the biggest, most implacable sound and an arrangement that made it feel as if the record lasted a lifetime, not three and a half minutes (“That,” the Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia said, “sounds like God hit the world and the world hit back”), failed to come anywhere near the radio; Spector closed his studio and began lecturing at colleges.”
― Greil Marcus, History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs

“At a press conference in Washington, D.C., in 1957, actress Helen Hayes claimed that her son (later known as James MacArthur, sidekick of Jack Lord in “Hawaii Five-O”) had been well on the path to juvenile delinquency, brought on by rock-and-roll records. She cured him by playing a Beethoven record.”
― Nick Tosches, Country: The Twisted Roots Of Rock 'n' Roll

“We read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming, our own consciousness in someone else's mind.”
― Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed My Life