Snatches from Time Past

This definitely is not exhaustive: I love many parts of the Bible but typing all the quotes up in here might take an age. Nevertheless, I hope to add them as I have time. Or I could just say: take on the challenge and read the (entire) Bible! =)

Text/textbooks

I dreamed that the earth was flat, and that a lot of people were glad when Columbus fell off the edge.

If pigs could fly, pork wings wouldn't taste any better than chicken wings.

Excuse me. You don't know me, but my giraffe has escaped into your yard and is eating your eucalyptus.

My third cousin enjoys carving symbolist poetry stanzas on watermelon rind.

Here come the pork wings.

"Indeed the term glia is derived from the Greek word for 'glue,' giving the impression that the main function of these cells is to keep the brain from running out of our ears!"

"In fact [...] the retina is actually part of the brain. (Think about that the next time you look deep into someone's eyes.)"

"If the brain were a chocolate chip cookie, and the neurons were the chocolate chips, the glia would be the cookie dough."

"But if The Great Mentioner turns out to be as unreal as the Easter Bunny, you have to figure out for yourself how to get mentioned."

"In 1980 Ronald Reagan said that trees cause pollution--oops[...]"

"Organisms are the refined products of thousands of generations of past selection, and a random change is not likely to improve the genome any more than firing a gunshot blindly through the hood of a car is likely to improve engine performance."

"In addition to digging, scallops can also skitter along the seafloor by flapping their shells, rather like the mechanical false teeth sold in novelty shops."

"They held out a carrot with one hand and picked up a bigger stick with the other."

"We shall," he promised, "squeeze the orange until the pips squeak."

"The French king Louis XII's famous diplomat Antoine du Prat was perhaps the most notorious example of absenteeism: as archbishop of Sens, the first time he entered his cathedral was in his own funeral procession."

"Industrial growth also promoted rapid urbanization, with its own awesome problems, as will be shown in Chapter 24."

"Like some students today, he [the cottage worker] might 'pull an all-nighter' on Thursday or Friday in order to get his work in [by Saturday] ."

"In the modern quest trilogy The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien, the hero is aided by trees."

1. Communism: you have 2 cows. Govt. takes both of them & gives you part of the milk.
2. Fasicm: you have 2 cows. Govt. takes both cows & sells you the milk.
3. Nazism: you have 2 cows. Govt. takes both cows, then shoots you.
4. Socialism: you have 2 cows. Govt. takes 1 and gives it to your neighbor.
5. Bureaucracy: you have 2 cows. Govt. takes both of them, shoots one, milks the other, then pours the milk down the drain.
6. Capitalism: you have 2 cows. you sell one of them & buy a bull.

"If you were small enough to stand on the outer surface of a cell, you would float, because most of the cell's plasma membrane is liquid. Floating alongside you would be proteins shaped like boulders, while towering overhead like huge trees would be a forest of other proteins."

"If you were submerged within a drop of water, with your body no bigger than a protein, what would you see? Water molecules as big as basketballs would be zipping around, many of them bashing into you!"

Novels

"A wizard is never late, nor is he early, he arrives precisely when he means to."

"'Many that live deserve death. Some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them[...]? Do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. Even the wisest cannot see all ends."

"Oh, but you are alone! Who knows what you have spoken to the darkness, in bitter watches of the night, when all your life seems to shrink, the walls of your bower closing in about you, like a hutch to trammel some wild thing in? So fair... so cold... like a morning of pale spring still clinging to winter's chill."

"The rock and pool, is nice and cool, so nice for feet!/I only wish, to catch a fish, so juicy sweet!"

"It's like in the great stories [...] The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were. And sometimes you didn't want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it's only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines, it will shine out the clearer."

"What do trees have to talk about? Except for the consistency of squirrel droppings." (movie)

"How do you pick up the threads of an old life? How do you go on, when in your heart you begin to understand there is no going back. There are some things that time can not mend. Some hurts that go too deep...that have taken hold." Return of the King (movie)

"The truth [..] It is a beautiful and terrible thing, and should therefore be treated with great caution."

"[...] the trouble is, humans do have a knack of choosing precisely those things that are worst for them."

"Understanding is the first step to acceptance, and only with acceptance can there be recovery."

Uncle Vernon: Listening to the news! Again?
Harry: Well, it changes every day, you see[...]

"Youth cannot know how age thinks and feels. But old men are guilty if they forget what it was to be young..."

"I think the cup of water on the burning log only steamed the ants[...]"

"'[...] as poison had been life, so the powerful antidote was death."

"Droll thing life is - that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose [...]If such is the ultimate form of wisdom, then life is a greater riddle than some of us think it to be."

"The mind of a man is capable of anything -- because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future."

"And what he knew was this - that should the water in the transparent thing disappear, the evil spirit inside the boiler would get angrey through the greatness of his thirst, and take a terrible vengeance."

"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

"I have an idea that Gatsby himself didn't believe it would come and perhaps he no longer cared. If that was true he must have felt that the had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about..."

Leper: They were preparing it, if you see what I mean, for the future. Everything has to evolve or else it perishes [...] Take the housefly. If it hadn't developed all those split-second reflexes it would have become extinct long ago.
Finny: You mean it adapted itself to the fly swatter?"

"'Human beings say, "It never rains but it pours." This is not very apt, for it frequently does rain without pouring. The rabbits' proverb is better expressed. They say, "One cloud feels lonely.": and indeed it is ture that the appearance of a single cloud often means that the sky will soon be overcast."

"'Quand on exige des preuves d'amour, c'est qu'on n'a pas confiance. Et là où il n'y a pas de confiance, il n'y a pas d'amour."

Poems

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