Home > Topic > canals

canals QUOTES

canals QUOTES

1 " Rake your lifestyle. Gather all bitterness. Burn this bad attitude that has chocked the canals of your success. Be set free! "

― Israelmore Ayivor ,

2 " The populace consists of individuals and free men, while the state is made up of numbers. When the state dominates, killing becomes abstract. Servitude began with the shepherds; in the river valleys it attained perfection with canals and dikes. Its model was the slavery in mines and mills. Since then, the ruses for concealing chains have been refined. "

― Ernst Jünger , Eumeswil

3 " The beauty of Mars exists in the human mind,” he said in that dry factual tone, and everyone stared at him amazed. “Without the human presence it is just a collection of atoms, no different than any other random speck of matter in the universe. It’s we who understand it, and we who give it meaning. All our centuries of looking up at the night sky and watching it wander through the stars. All those nights of watching it through the telescopes, looking at a tiny disk trying to see canals in the albedo changes. All those dumb sci-fi novels with their monsters and maidens and dying civilizations. And all the scientists who studied the data, or got us here. That’s what makes Mars beautiful. Not the basalt and the oxides "

― Kim Stanley Robinson , Red Mars (Mars Trilogy, #1)

4 " I have set off and found that there is no end to even the simplest journey of the mind. I begin, and straight away a hundred alternative routes present themselves. I choose one, no sooner begin, than a hundred more appear. Every time I try to narrow down my intent I expand it, and yet those straits and canals still lead me to the open sea, and then I realize how vast it all is, this matter of the mind. I am confounded by the shining water and the size of the world. "

― Jeanette Winterson , Sexing the Cherry

5 " Who wants to see the Future, who ever does? A man can face the Past, but to think - the pillars crumbled, you say? And the sea empty, and the canals dry, and the maidens dead, and the flowers withered?" The Martian was silent, but then he looked ahead. " But there they are. I see them. Isn't that enough for me? They wait for me now, no matter what you say. "

6 " .. the smell of canals and cigarette smoke, all the people sitting outside the cafés drinking beer, saying their r's and g's in a way I'd never learn. I missed the future. Obviously I knew even before this recurrance that I'd never grow old with Augustus Waters. But thinking about Lidewij and her boyfriend, I felt robbed. I would probably never again see the ocean from thirty thousand feet above, so far up you can't make out the waves or any boats, so that the ocean is a great and endless monolith. I could imagine it. I could remember it. But I couldn't see it again, and it occurred to me that the voracious ambition of humans is never sated by dreams coming true, because there is always the thought that everything might be done better and again. That is probably true even if you live to be ninety. "

7 " I watched the shadow of our plane hastening below us across hedges and fences, rows of poplars and canals … Nowhere, however, was a single human being to be seen. No matter whether one is flying over Newfoundland or the sea of lights that stretches from Boston to Philadelphia after nightfall, over the Arabian deserts which gleam like mother-of-pearl, over the Ruhr or the city of Frankfurt, it is as though there were no people, only the things they have made and in which they are hiding. One sees the places where they live and the roads that link them, one sees the smoke rising from their houses and factories, one sees the vehicles in which they sit, but one sees not the people themselves. And yet they are present everywhere upon the face of the earth, extending their dominion by the hour, moving around the honeycombs of towering buildings and tied into networks of a complexity that goes far beyond the power of any one individual to imagine, from the thousands of hoists and winches that once worked the South African diamond mines to the floors of today's stock and commodity exchanges, through which the global tides of information flow without cease. If we view ourselves from a great height, it is frightening to realize how little we know about our species, our purpose and our end, I thought, as we crossed the coastline and flew out over the jelly-green sea. "

― W.G. Sebald , The Rings of Saturn

8 " It’s ridiculous to repeat costly mistakes because you believe there is always a next chance. Mistakes may flow, but you have all it takes to close the canals they used! "

― Israelmore Ayivor , Daily Drive 365

9 " Underground, in the dark wet hole that was home to the spiders and the rats, something moved. It had no right to be down there but it belonged nowhere else. Half drowned half alive it pushed the water ahead of it into the culverts and drains as it passed. Right under the city and out into the suburbs and fields these tunnels fed into the river and the network of canals that had fed the industrial revolution. A thousand eyes, some blinded, that had never seen the sun strained in the soiled darkness. It struggled on and it listened with a thousand ears not its own and it cried. "

10 " She didn’t watch the dead, ancient bone-chess cities slide under, or the old canals filled with emptiness and dreams. Past dry rivers and dry lakes they flew, like a shadow of the moon, like a torch burning. "

― Ray Bradbury , The Martian Chronicles

11 " Miss Appleby, her library books, and her story-telling sessions were very popular with all the children in Heavenly Valley. To Nancy and Plum they were a magic carpet that whisked them out of the dreariness and drudgery of their lives at Mrs. Monday's and transported them to palaces in India, canals in Holland, pioneer stockades during the Indian wars, cattle ranches in the West, mountains in Switzerland, pagodas in China, igloos in Alaska, jungles in Africa, castles in England, slums in London, gardens in Japan, or most important of all, into happy homes where there were mothers and fathers and no Mrs. Mondays or Marybelles. "

― Betty MacDonald , Nancy and Plum

12 " I had seen the flowers on her dress beside the canals in the north, she was indigenous like a herb, and I never wanted to go home. "

― Graham Greene

13 " How fun it would be to bounce on the back of Lidewij Vliegenthart’s bike down the brick streets, her curly red hair blowing into my face, the smell of the canals and cigarette smoke, all the people sitting outside the cafés drinking beer, saying their r’s and g’s in a way I’d never learn. I missed the future. Obviously I knew even before his recurrence that I’d never grow old with Augustus Waters. But thinking about Lidewij and her boyfriend, I felt robbed. I would probably never again see the ocean from thirty thousand feet above, so far up that you can’t make out the waves or any boats, so that the ocean is a great and endless monolith. I could imagine it. I could remember it. But I couldn’t see it again, and it occurred to me that the voracious ambition of humans is never sated by dreams coming true, because there is always the thought that everything might be done better and again. "

14 " Some Southerners effectively applied slave labor to the cultivation of corn, grain, and hemp (for making rope and twine), to mining and lumbering, to building canals and railroads, and even to the manufacture of textiles, iron, and other industrial products. Nevertheless, no other American region contained so many white farmers who merely subsisted on their own produce. The “typical” white Southerner was not a slaveholding planter but a small farmer who tried, often without success, to achieve both relative self-sufficiency and a steady income from marketable cash crops. "

― David Brion Davis , Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World

15 " The old face, crinkled and dented with canals running every which way, pushed and shoved up against itself for a while, till a big old smile busted out from beneath 'em all, and his grey eyes fairly glowed. It was the first time I ever saw him smile free. A true smile. It was like looking at the face of God. And I knowed then, for the first time, that him being the person to lead the colored to freedom weren't no lunacy. It was something he knowed true inside him. I saw it clear for the first time. I knowed then, too, that he knowed what I was - from the very first. "

― James McBride , The Good Lord Bird

16 " The crowning fortune of a man is to be born to some pursuit which finds him employment and happiness whether it be to make baskets or broadswords or canals or statues or songs. "

17 " The death industry markets caskets and embalming under the rubric of helping bodies look 'natural,' but our current death customs are as natural as training majestic creatures like bears and elephants to dance in cute little outfits, or erecting replicas of the Eiffel Tower and Venetian canals in the middle of the harsh American desert. "

18 " Amsterdam was a great surprise to me. I had always thought of Venice as the city of canals it had never entered my mind that I should find similar conditions in a Dutch town. "