“ … ”

Well, after some correspondence it is clear that the clerical mind is so far up the institutional fundamentum that it cannot understand what the issues are except from a clerical point of view.

maggie ross

While I was sitting one night with a poet friend watching a great opera performed in a tent under arc lights, the poet took my arm and pointed silently. Far up, blundering out of the night, a huge Cecropia moth swept past from light to light over the posturing of the actors. “He doesn’t know,” my friend whispered excitedly. “He’s passing through an alien universe brightly lit but invisible to him. He’s in another play; he doesn’t see us. He doesn’t know. Maybe it’s happening right now to us.”

loren eiseley

Sometime in May 1952 Raymond Gosling, a doctoral candidate under Rosalind Franklin at the Wheatstone Physics Laboratory, King’s College, took some 35 strands of sodium thymonucleate obtained from a calf thymus, stretched them taut across a paperclip mounted to a cork with rubber cement and sealed the makeshift assembly in a camera fitted to an X-ray tube. Gosling then bubbled water and hydrogen through the camera and exposed the film for nearly 90 hours. Later he recalled “looking at the developer, and up through the tank swam this beautiful spotted photograph.” The “spotted photograph”, now known simply as Photo 51, was to anyone who could interpret it the first clear evidence of the structure of DNA. It would become the most iconic photograph in the history of biology.

codex99

I don’t reach for a glass of wine after the child’s in bed and dinner’s over. I reach for a bar of chocolate and push it into my mouth like a log into a sawmill. When my tongue is coated in the ambrosial mixture of sugar, milk powder and vegetable fat, when the glucose hits my bloodstream, when my stomach is filling with caramel, peanut pieces, shortbread wafer, or any of the multitudinous other vehicles the ceaseless ingenuity of man has created to deliver yet more deliciously the very emptiest of calories to my Stakhanovite digestive system, that’s when I relax.

lucy mangan

The mind is like tofu – it tastes like whatever you marinate it in.

sylvia boorstein

I imagined a lot of things. That I would shine. That I’d be good. I’d dwell bareheaded on a summit turning a wheel that would turn the earth and undetected, amongst the clouds, I would have some influence; to be of some avail.

patti smith

What matters matters but it doesn’t. Some of the time everything matters. Much of the time nothing matters. In the long run both everything and nothing matter a lot.

james broughton

Karmic results are multiplied by one hundred million on solar eclipses and seven million on lunar eclipses.

darma practice calendar

The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there.

leslie poles hartley

I want to believe there are geniuses scheming to astonish the rest of us, just for the pleasure of it.

marilynne robinson