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Quotes in 2005
Dr. Tatinan’s Sex Advice to all creation, OliviaJudson,
Henry Holt and Company, 2002
One species of sea slug, Sapha amicorum, a tiny hermaphrodite
from the Red Sea, actually has its male genitalia inside its mouth, and copulation
is an extraspecial kiss. Lucky they don't have to go to the dentist. But
perhaps the oddest approach I've come across is practiced by three obscure
relations of the octopus, all of which have abandoned the seafloor for open
water. The paper nautilus, the best known of the trio, is an ethereal creature.
Bright white, with hints of purple, blue, and red, the female lives in a
beautiful white shell and floats through the water. The male is tiny, and
hardly anyone has ever seen him. Not even his mate. What appears to happen
is that he fires off his penis—a modified tentacle—which takes
up an independent life within the female, who may entertain several such
guests at once. This is so weird that it's not surprising early naturalists
thought the penises were parasitic worms. Imagine the lonely-hearts advertisement
of a female paper nautilus: "Fire and forget. Send your organ to a loving
home."
Chronicles, Bob Dylan, Simon and Schuster, 2004 Sometimes you say things in songs even if there’s a small chance of them being true. And sometimes you say things that have nothing to do with the truth of what you want to say and sometimes you say things that everyone knows to be true. Then again, at the same time, you’re thinking that the only truth on earth is that there is no truth on it. Whatever you are saying, you’re saying in a ricky-tick way. There’s never time to reflect. You stitched and pressed and packed and drove, is what you did.
The Weather Identification Handbook, Storm Dunlop,
Lyons Press, 2003 Over larger fires, such as those caused deliberately in the destruction of
forests or natural wildfires, extremely large clouds may be created. These
may develop as far as the cumulus congestus stage, and give rise to rain.
Some reach so far into the atmosphere that they turn into cumulonimbus, not
only producing heavy rainfall, but also turning into thunderstorms. Such
rain has sometimes helped to extinguish the fire, but generally the cloud
has drifted too far away for it to have an effect. Under extremely dry conditions,
lightning from a cumulonimbus produced over a wildfire, has started new fires
a considerable distance away.
Just Above Water, Louis Jenkins, Holy Cow Press, 1997 I
once believed that behind all the things I did, or more often failed to
do, there was a
great moral purpose, or at least some coherent principle, a raison d’etre.
If there is such a principle it has never become quite clear to me. Instead,
over the years, I have managed to take a random selection of bad habits
and herd them together into a life.
Eucalyptus, Murray Bail, Harcourt, 1998. On this Friday morning she put on a dress faded to butter colour and felt loose and free; so much so she ruffled her beauty with a look of determined impatience. And she felt so aware of her own self within the sleeveless dress she flowed forward in a kind of bonelessness, so it felt.
When God Was a Woman, Merlin Stone. As I considered the power of myth, it became increasingly difficult to avoid questioning the influential effects that the myths accompanying the religions that worship male deities had upon my own image of what it meant to be born a female, another Eve, progenitress of my childhood faith. As a child, I was told that Eve had been made from Adam's rib, brought into being to be his companion and helpmate, to keep him from being lonely. As if this assignment of permanent second mate, never to be captain, was not oppressive enough to my future plans as a developing member of society, I next learned that Eve was considered to be foolishly gullible. My elders explained that she had been easily tricked by the promises of the perfidious serpent. She defied God and provoked Adam to do the same, thus ruining a good thing—the previously blissful life in the Garden of Eden. Why Adam himself was never thought to be equally as foolish was apparently never worth discussing. But identifying with Eve, who was presented as the symbol of all women, the blame was in some mysterious way mine—and God, viewing the whole affair as my fault, chose to punish me by decreeing: "I will greatly multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children, yet your desire shall be for your husband and he shall rule over you" (Gen. 3:16).
The Shadow of the Wind, Carlos Ruiz Zafon. "This is a place of mystery, Daniel, a sanctuary. Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens. This place was already ancient when my father brought me here for the first time, many years ago. Perhaps as old as the city itself. Nobody knows for certain how long it has existed, or who created it. I will tell you what my father told me, though. When a library disappears, or a bookshop closes down, when a book is consigned to oblivion, those of us who know this place, its guardians, make sure that it gets here. In this place, books no longer remembered by anyone, books that are lost in time, live forever, waiting for the day when they will reach a new reader's hands. In the shop we buy and sell them, but in truth books have no owner. Every book you see here has been somebody's best friend. Now they have only us, Daniel. Do you think you'll be able to keep such a secret?"
The Grail Bird, Tim Gallagher, Houghton Mifflin Press, 2005. A lot of people were searching for ivory-bills in those days, Laurie told me. One of them was Lester Short, of the American Museum of Natural History. "He had the idea that you could fly an airplane over these forests and see ivory-bills, because from the top their big white secondaries would be so obvious," he said. "He actually came down here and flew over the Atchafalaya and also the Big Thicket in Texas. He concluded that there were no ivory-bills, because he hadn't seen any." Laurie then asked Short how many pileated woodpeckers he had seen on his overflights, and he replied, "None." "Well, it's pretty obvious if you can't see a common bird like a pileated, what are your chances of seeing an ivory-bill?" said Laurie.
The Work of Wolves, Kent Meyers, Harcourt, Inc, 2004 A FEW WEEKS AFTER HE GRADUATED from high School, Carson Fielding moved out
of his parents' house into the old one. In the two years since his grandfather's
death, Carson had walked past the old house every day, on his way to doing
something else, but he stopped at the broken steps one late summer evening,
bowed his head for a moment, then put his hand on the doorknob, opened the
door, and stepped into the empty rooms where only the smells of his grandfather
remained: stale cigarette smoke, dirt, sweat
Carson's grandfather had never resisted cleanliness but had never considered
it necessary either. After his death, Marie and Charles had washed the floors,
vacuumed the threadbare carpets, unplugged the appliances—and then wondered
what the point was and stopped. Carson stood in a cleaner version of the house
his grandfather had stepped from the morning he died. The meager furniture
stood where Ves had arranged it. Carson had never known a space that so much
framed an absence.
"White people have a funny way of doing things, enit?" Cy said. "They
find a forest, they cut it down so they can settle there. They find a prairie,
they plant trees so they can settle there. Find a swamp, they drain it, but
if they find a desert, they make a lake to irrigate it. Backwards thinking."
"
They just want everything to be the same."
"
Know what a modern-day tipi is? A motor home. Used to be us Indians lived in
tipis so we could get away from fires and chase buffalo. Now the white guys
live in motor homes so they can get away from all the places they ruined and
chase golf balls. They stick us on the rez because they can't handle all that
roaming we did. Then they build roads to make roaming easier and put wheels
on the tipis. What is the lesson from this, big brother? To be an Indian now,
you must buy a motor home and learn to golf."
The Forests for the Trees, Jeff Forester, MN Historical
Press, 2004, White-tailed deer were once rather rare in the north country.
But since the creation of Superior National Forest in 1909, foresters, under
pressure from hunting organizations, have been actively managing habitat for
the species, and today deer herds have reached unprecedented numbers. Before
1920 there were about 480 caribou, 480 moose, 240 white-tailed deer, and 120
elk in the 344-square-mile Voyageurs National Park, twenty miles west of the
BWCAW. By 1981 the caribou and elk were completely exterminated and the moose
population had withered to just twenty-four animals due to hunting pressure
and loss of habitat from logging. The deer population, on the other hand, had
exploded to 1,200, more than the combined number of elk, caribou, and moose
of prelogging days.
Nature Noir, Jordan Fisher Smith, Houghton Mifflin 2005. Whatever the merits of this and the miners' other arguments, State Parks was not known for political heroism. The agency's director immediately rescinded the closure, proclaiming that the miners' camps and dredges could remain on the river while under study — a study that is apparently unfinished over twenty years later, because results have never been presented. (Some of the dredges are still there.) By 1984 the only curb on mining was a rule that no one could camp more than thirty days at a stretch in any state park, which in practice made it hard to set up and run larger mining operations. Still, you had to find the miners' camps to enforce it. To further placate the miners, State Parks' director appointed a sort of outhouse czar from headquarters, and under his direction Auburn State Recreation Area — which otherwise lacked the most rudimentary facilities — received a diaspora of privies. Some were installed in places so remote they had to be flown in by helicopter; unused, they were soon overgrown with wild grape and blackberry vines. Some were installed too close to the river and were carried away by floods; for several years the remains of one could be seen perched in a tree near Lake Clementine. Some were used for target practice. Others disappeared entirely, and no one knew exactly what had happened to them.