My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.
—Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions, 1973
Some 260 species of owls exist today. … There are Chocolate Boobooks and Bare-legged Owls, Powerful Owls and Fearful Owls (named for their bloodcurdling, humanlike scream repeated every ten seconds), White-chinned Owls and Tawny-browed Owls, Vermiculated Screech Owls and Verreaux’s Eagle Owls, Africa’s biggest, with its startling pink eyelids. Some owls, like the ubiquitous barn owls that occur in multiple forms worldwide, carry a raft of common names reflective of their mythic power: demon owl, ghost owl, death owl, night owl, church owl, cave owl, stone owl, hobgoblin owl, dobby owl, monkey-faced owl, silver owl, and golden owl.
—Jennifer Ackerman, What an Owl Knows, 2023
Pandemonium! What a great thing football is, that allows us at rare moments to be pandemonious.
—Roy Blount Jr., About Three Bricks Shy of a Load, 1974
As I came home through the woods with my string of fish, trailing my pole, it being now quite dark, I caught a glimpse of a woodchuck stealing across my path, and felt a strange thrill of savage delight, and was strongly tempted to seize and devour him raw; not that I was hungry then, except for that wildness which he represented.
—Henry David Thoreau, “Higher Laws,” Walden, 1854
I had still the ambition, formed in Sligo in my teens, of living in imitation of Thoreau on Innisfree, a little island in Lough Gill, and when walking through Fleet Street very homesick I heard a little tinkle of water and saw a fountain in a shop-window which balanced a little ball upon its jet, and began to remember lake water.
—William Butler Yeats, The Autobiography of William Butler Yeats, 1916
You made your great mistake when you abandoned the poetry business, and set up shop as a wizard in general practice.
—H. L. Mencken, letter to Ezra Pound, November 1936
Tantrums and passions I don’t need, endurance is what I need. I have found that it is even possible to take a certain pleasure out of submission to necessity. That have I borne, this can I bear also.
—Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose, 1971
When they are not insisting on the absolute non-existence of ghosts, reasonable people are apt to make rather nervous jokes about them. Asked if he believed in ‘ghosts and apparitions,’ Coleridge said no. But that wasn’t all he said. The complete sentence was: ‘No, madam! I have seen far too many myself.’
—Michael Wood, “Icicles by Cynthia,” London Review of Books, January 2, 2020
An unannounced guest who enters a king’s hall having spent the previous night with an unknown man (possibly a tutor) named Úlfr can be up to little good. …
Such a guest is certain to be an outlaw (vargr), an avenger (úlfr), the pupil of a dangerous forest tutor (*viðólfr), or an animal warrior bearing a young wolf initiate (hwelp) away to an island fortress.
—Gerard Breen, “ ‘The Wolf is at the door’: Outlaws, Assassins, and Avengers Who Cry ‘Wolf!’ ” Arkiv för nordisk filologi, Vol. 114, 1999
You know, one time Curtis LeMay—the general?—one time Curtis LeMay appeared before a Senate committee asking for ten thousand nuclear warheads for the Air Force, and one of the senators, Everett Dirksen, says, “I thought you told us that with six thousand warheads you could reduce the entire Soviet Union to cinders. Why should we give you ten thousand?” And LeMay says, “Senator, I wanna see the cinders dance.”
—Tom Wolfe, A Man in Full, 1998
The truth is, the typical Public Schoolboy is acceptable at a dance and invaluable in a shipwreck, but he is no earthly good as an ordinary citizen on ordinary occasions. He does not like work, for one thing. He has always been accustomed to put other things in front of it and he never loses the habit.
—J. F. Roxburgh, Eleutheros, 1930
Bell’s own work—which focuses on PETase, the enzyme that Ideonella sakaiensis produces to break down PET plastics—takes a brute-force approach in order to turbocharge natural evolution. … In the wild, a mutation in an enzyme might occur only once in every few thousand times the bacteria divides. Bell ensures she gets hundreds, or thousands of potentially beneficial mutants to test. She then measures each one for its ability to degrade plastic. Any candidates that show even marginal improvement get another round of mutations. The head of the NREL research group, Gregg Beckham, refers to it as “evolving the crap out of an enzyme.”
—Stephen Buranyi, “ ‘We are just getting started’: the plastic-eating bacteria that could change the world,” The Guardian, September 28, 2023
We sit down
in the smell of the past
and rise in a light
that is already leaving.
We ache in secret,
memorizing
a gloomy line
or two of German.
When spring comes
we promise to act
the fool. Pour,
rain! Sail, wind,
with your cargo of zithers!
—Rita Dove, “November for Beginners,” 1981
The pure products of America
go crazy—
the stifling heat of September
Somehow
it seems to destroy us
It is only in isolate flecks that
something
is given off
No one
to witness
and adjust, no one to drive the car
—William Carlos Williams, “To Elsie,” 1938
Life itself is a bubble and a scepticism, and a sleep within a sleep.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Experience,” 1844
