Continental Quotes

There is a gyre of discarded floating plastic the size of the continental USA in the ocean. In it, plastic trash outweighs plankton 40 to 1. ~ David Suzuki

Unlike the rationalism of the French Revolution, true liberalism has no quarrel with religion, and I can only deplore the militant and essentially illiberal antireligionism which animated so much of nineteenth-century Continental liberalism ... What distinguishes the liberal from the conservative here is that, however profound his own spiritual beliefs, he will never regard himself as entitled to impose them on others and that for him the spiritual and the temporal are different sphere which ought not to be confused. ~ Friedrich August Von Hayek

I wish that the founders had had the foresight to hang on to and enshrine another one of Independence Hall's chairs, the one that Benjamin Rush mentioned in a letter to John Adams about how Thomas Jefferson objected when his colleagues in the Continental Congress considered a fast day, which Jefferson pooh-poohed as too religious. Rush reminded Adams, 'You rose and defended the motion, and in reply to Mr. Jefferson's objections to Christianity you said you were sorry to hear such sentiments …. You suspected, you told me, that you had offended him, but that he soon convinced you to the contrary by crossing the room and taking a seat in the chair next to you.'

Who knows what happened to that particular chair. … But it might have been a more helpful, sobering symbolic object than that chair with the rising sun. Then perhaps citizens making pilgrimages to Independence Hall could file past the chair Jefferson walked across an aisle to sit in, and we could all ponder the amount of respect, affection, and wishy-washy give-and-take needed to keep a house divided in reasonable repair. ~ Sarah Vowell

I finished 'Ice Age: Continental Drift' in 2012, and I'm living in my agent's guest bedroom in Los Angeles because you don't make a ton of money writing an animated film. The movie makes a billion dollars, and you make 'twelve cents.' ~ Jason Fuchs

In England in the 19th century, advances in printing methods, combined with the rise of a prosperous middle class, engendered a booming new industry of books published just for children. Casting about for cheap story material, English publishers laid hands on the subtle, sensual adult fairy tales of the Continental tradition and revised them into simpler stories instilled with Victorian values. Although these simplified versions retained much of the violence of the older stories, elements of sexuality and moral complexity were carefully scrubbed away - along with the fiesty heroines who appeared everywhere in the older tales, tamed now into models of Victorian propiety and passivity. In the 20th century, the Walt Disney Studios watered down the tales further still in popular animated films like Sleeping Beauty and Snow White, continuing the trend of turning active heroines into powerless damsels in distress. Walt Disney considered even the Victorian versions of the tales too dark for 20th century audiences. "It's just that people now don't want fairy stories the way they were written," Disney commented. "They were too rough." ~ Terri Windling

I possess everyone who sleeps in the motor court, roam their memories, and embed recurrent nightmares that will destroy their sleep for weeks after I've departed them."
"I'd prefer a free continental breakfast. ~ Dean Koontz

Our articles of confederation ought to be revised and measures immediately taken to invigorate the Continental Union. Depend upon it: there lies the danger for America. This last stroke is wanting, and unless the states be strongly bound to each other, we have to fear from British and, indeed, from European politics. ~ Marquis De Lafayette

A survey of oceanic (i.e. remote) islands found that, as far back as records exist, they have been accumulating alien plants. In 1860 the average oceanic island had less than 1 introduced plant for every 10 natives. By 1940 the ratio was 1 alien for every 2 natives, and today the ratio is about 1:1. Despite all these new arrivals there have been very few extinctions among the original inhabitants, so the number of plant species on such islands has approximately doubled. Thus, although left to themselves remote islands tend to have rather few species (compared to similar continental areas at the same latitude), so many species have been introduced to Hawaii that it now has as many plants as a similar area of Mexico. Moreover, the evidence suggests that remote islands are by no means 'full' of plants, and that there is room for even more alien plants to establish, and thus for total plant diversity to increase: at the current rate the average oceanic island will have 3 aliens for every 2 natives by 2060. Do we have any idea how many different plant species might eventually be able to coexist on an island like Hawaii? No, we don't. Or, to express that conclusion in a more general form, in a report from US ecologists Dov Sax and Steve Gaines: 'we have a relatively poor understanding of the processes that ultimately limit how many species can inhabit any given place or area ~ Ken Thompson

During the darkest days of the Revolutionary War, the Continental Congress and George Washington - I call him the first George W. - (laughter and applause) - urged citizens to pray and to give thanks and to ask for God's protection. ~ James Monroe

I'm working on a movie called 'Virgin Mary' with Abigail Breslin. I'm also in 'Ice Age 4: Continental Drift.' And I have a television movie coming on Nickelodeon that I worked on with Nick Cannon. I acted in it, but I am more excited about being a producer! ~ Keke Palmer

Is a one foot by one foot piece of cloth a blanket? What about if you rotate it all over your body throughout the night like it was Colorado and you were the continental US? ~ Jarod Kintz

Existentialism, in both its Continental and its Anglo-Saxon versions, is an attempt to solve the problem without really facing it: to solve it by attributing to the individual an empty, lonely freedom, a freedom, if he wishes, to 'fly in the face of the facts'. What it pictures is indeed the fearful solitude of the individual marooned upon a tiny island in the middle of a sea of scientific facts, and morality escaping from science only by a wild leap of the will. But our situation is not like this. ~ Iris Murdoch

My early years abroad were spent mainly upon the European Continent, and public duties since have led me to make prolonged stays in various Continental states France, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Russia where the study of Continental statesmen has been almost forced upon me. ~ Andrew Dickson White

The entire North Polar ice cap is disappearing before our very eyes. It's been the size of the continental United States for the last 3 million years and now 40 percent is gone and the rest of it is going. ~ Al Gore

Who--Whoo--Whoop! Who'll come gouge with me? Who'll come bite with me? Rowff--Yough--Snort--YAHOO! In the name of the great Jehova and the Continental Congress, I have passed the Rubicon--swim or sink, live or die, survive or perish, I'm in fer a fight, I'll go my death on a fight, and with a firm reliance on the pertection of divine protestants, a fight I must have, or else I'll have to be salted down to save me from spilin'! You hear me over thar, you washed-up varmints? This is the hope of the world talkin' to you! I am Sam Slick the Yankee Peddler…. ~ Robert Coover

Soap is another article in great demand
the Continental allowance is too small, and dear, as every necessary of life is now got, a soldier's pay will not enable him to purchase, by which means his consequent dirtiness adds not a little to the disease of the Army. ~ George Washington

Juan de Grijalva, coincidentally the first European to smoke on continental American soil, ~ Iain Gately

We're so self-important. Everybody's going to save something now. "Save the trees, save the bees, save the whales, save those snails." And the greatest arrogance of all: save the planet. Save the planet, we don't even know how to take care of ourselves yet. I'm tired of this shit. I'm tired of f-ing Earth Day. I'm tired of these self-righteous environmentalists, these white, bourgeois liberals who think the only thing wrong with this country is that there aren't enough bicycle paths. People trying to make the world safe for Volvos. Besides, environmentalists don't give a shit about the planet. Not in the abstract they don't. You know what they're interested in? A clean place to live. Their own habitat. They're worried that some day in the future they might be personally inconvenienced. Narrow, unenlightened self-interest doesn't impress me.

The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sun spots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles … hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worldwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages … And we think some plastic bags and some aluminum cans are going to make a difference? The planet isn't going anywhere. WE are!

We're going away. Pack your shit, folks. We're going away. And we won't leave much of a trace, either. Maybe a little Styro ~ George Carlin

Just ask any subjugated thing-
a wife, population, race,
deferred dream and
resource misappropriated,
or continental plate;
and it will tell you stories
of inevitable fault lines
of not-quite-stray bullets
and strike slip boundaries,
places where intensity builds
and lets off small or great sparks, ~ Marie Anzalone

We now have many of the answers that once eluded Darwin, thanks to two developments that he could not have imagined: continental drift and molecular taxonomy. ~ Jerry A. Coyne

Namely, the very values that the American patriots claimed to be fighting for were incompatible with the disciplined culture required in a professional army. Republics were committed to a core principle of consent, while armies were the institutional embodiments of unthinking obedience and routinized coercion. The very idea of a "standing army" struck most members of the Continental Congress and the state legislatures as a highly dangerous threat to republican principles. ~ Joseph J. Ellis

I got up at exactly 6:15 a.m., showered, and did ten minutes of yoga. Then I had a continental breakfast with freshly squeezed orange juice, half a bagel with goat cheese, and a green smoothie, all ~ Rachel Renee Russell

The stories abounded, both recounting these cross-continental journeys and perhaps inspiring them – how Hellenic Jason gathered his Argonauts together (including Augeas, whose vast stables Herakles would be forced to clean) for adventure and profit, how he stopped off along the Bosphorus and discovered the land of the rising sun before other Greek heroes headed to Asia in search of Helen, Troy and glory. In the Homeric epics we hear of Jason travelling east where he tangles with Medea of Colchis, her aunt Circe and the feisty Amazon tribe. Lured by the promise of gold (early and prodigious metalworking did indeed take place in the region – perhaps sparking the Greek idea that the East was 'rich in gold') and then detained by the potions and poisons of Princess Medea, Jason succeeded in penetrating the Caucasus – a land which, in the Greek mind, wept with both peril and promise. It was here that Prometheus was chained to a rock with iron rivets for daring to steal fire from the gods. Archaeology east of Istanbul demonstrates how myth grazes history. ~ Bettany Hughes

Continental Baking Company, Ninth and Clinton Streets, ~ Holly Metz

Then I had a continental breakfast with freshly squeezed orange juice, half a bagel with goat cheese, and a green smoothie, all served on a silver tray by my maid, Olga, right in my bedroom. ~ Rachel Renee Russell

I get back in the Continental and continue down the road to the cafe. Then I pull in and there's Larry Johnson's '57 Ford pickup in the parking lot. As I enter the little cafe, I see Larry and Briggs in the corner, drinking some coffee and having a late breakfast. I go right over and sit down with them. We don't say much. David says something about Kirby getting a job at one of the studios. Kirby is very good with his hands and can fix anything, plus he has a very friendly personality. We are happy for him. Larry has to make a call and gets up, heading for the pay phone in the corner. He has us get him another coffee when the waitress comes back. Briggs looks at me and asks what I've been doing. ~ Neil Young

God bless my father, but he always spoke in this continental, literary accent, probably because he was a professor of comparative literature and he made the decision to speak with distinction. ~ Nicolas Cage

The major challenge for the United States is whether it can become the first outward-looking, continental, nonimperialist power in history. ~ Lawrence Summers

I'm English enough to feel something of a gut-reaction to modernism, to continental philosophising and anything that smacks of a refusal to pay attention to the forensics: the empirical facts on the ground. ~ Will Self

Continental thinkers have been obsessed with bourgeois man as representing the worst and most contemptible failure of modernity, which must at all costs be overcome. Nihilism in its most palpable sense means that the bourgeois has won, that the future, all foreseeable futures, belong to him, that all heights above him and all depths beneath him are illusory and that life is not worth living on these terms. ~ Allan Bloom

The Czech Republic, severed from its old Slovak half, sits in apparent landlocked contentment, inside the European Union but outside the troubled Euro Zone, set into the new Continental mosaic like one of the small sturdy paving stones, just a few inches square, that form the sidewalks under the visitor's ambling feet. ~ Thomas Mallon

In other words, you're justifying the Hundred Years' War.'

'More or less. For it enabled our two peoples to become deeply interdependent, allowing the most fruitful of intellectual exchanges.'

'You mean, the French are "anglicized" without knowing it.'

'And the English have assimilated their Continental experience from that time much more than you think. But this is what I was leading up to: the Englishman is essentially a mystical being. And, because he's scrupulous, he's apprehensive. And therefore susceptible to everything that might be interpreted as a superhuman manifestation, whether it be a legend of esoteric significance - as in this case - or an event of peculiar resonance. Don't forget, all the official bodies in Paris - parliament, clergy, and especially the university - were in favour of the English at the period I'm talking about.'

'Of course! ~ Jacques Yonnet

A new theory is guilty until proven innocent, and the pre-existing theory innocent until proven guilty ... Continental drift was guilty until proven innocent. ~ David M. Raup

On the Glass-Steagall thing, like I said, if you could demonstrate to me that it was a mistake, I'd be glad to look at the evidence. But I can't blame [the Republicans]. This wasn't something they forced me into. I really believed that given the level of oversight of banks and their ability to have more patient capital, if you made it possible for [banks] to go into the investment banking business as continental European investment banks could always do, that it might give us a more stable source of long-term investment. ~ William J. Clinton

He immediately began to de-privatize. He revoked the licences to the unpopular Imperial Continental Gas Association and fashioned it into a company owned by the municipality. The same happened with the water pipeline over the dunes and the Amsterdamse Omnibus Maatschappij (Amsterdam Omnibus Company), which had run a number of horse-drawn trams in the city since 1875. In doing all this, Treub instigated an evolutionary process that was to give a lasting social basis to city policy. From ~ Geert Mak

The tattoo on her left forearm. Five digits encoding nothing but the unspoken prohibition on my asking her about them. The jaunty 7 with its continental slash. ~ Michael Chabon

In mission, also on a continental level, it is very important to reaffirm the family, which remains the essential cell of society and the Church; young people, who are the face of the Church's future; women, who play a fundamental role in passing on the faith and who are a daily source of strength in a society that carries this faith forward and renews it. ~ Pope Francis

People feel that European institutions are remote and bureaucratic, run by shady cosmopolitan elites. Britain is not absolutely exceptional because if you look at the opinion polls, those sentiments are now quite widespread also in continental Europe. ~ Timothy Garton Ash

Last Victorian and Edwardian Britain saw a mega-change in reading habits. For the first time fiction took the primary place in book publishing, and the medium was taken up by briliant and entertaining authors with an agenda for 'a brave new world'. Such men as Thomas Hardy, H. G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw were the opinion-makers for coming generations. 'With the next phase of Victorian fiction', wrote G. K. Chesterton, 'we enter a new world; the later, more revolutionary, more continental, freer but in some ways weker world in which we live today.'
Chesterton did not live to see the full consequences of the change but W. R. Inge predicted what was coming when he wrote:
No God. No country. No family. Refusal to serve in war. Free love. More play. Less work. No punishments. Go as you please. It is difficult to imagine any programme which, if carried out, would be more utterly ruinous to a country situated as Great Britain is today. ~ Iain H. Murray

We want to see oil and gas regulations on a continental basis given the integrated nature of this industry, with the current conditions in the oil and gas sector, this government will not consider unilateral regulation. ~ Stephen Harper

Benedict Arnold was appointed to the rank of general in the Continental Army by George Washington during the American War of Independence. It was up to him to protect the fortifications at West Point, New York, which in 1802 became the U.S. Military Academy. Arnold however planned to surrender his command to the British forces. When his treasonous act was discovered Arnold fled down the Hudson River to the British sloop-of-war Vulture, avoiding capture by the forces of George Washington, who had previously been alerted to the plot. Arnold was hailed a hero by the British, who gave him a commission in the British Army as brigadier general. In the winter of 1782, after the war, he moved to London with his wife where he was received as a hero by King George III. In the United States his name "Benedict Arnold" became synonyms for the words "TRAITOR & TREASON."
Cohorting with a foreign power to overthrow the government or purposely aiding the enemy is an act of Treason! ~ Hank Bracker

The nearest the modern general or admiral comes to a small-arms encounter of any sort is at a duck hunt in the company of corporation executives at the retreat of Continental Motors, Inc. ~ C. Wright Mills

The wilderness is not a landscape you visit; it is all around you, wherever you are. We persuade ourselves that our taming of the world is profound, we lay water mains and sewers and read thousand year old books, we drive our autobahns through solid rock, we huddle together in caves lit by the incandescence of television screens. We do everything we can to be safe, and still the planet spins, the winds roar, the great ice caps creak and heave, the continental plates shudder and bring cities crashing to the ground, the viruses infect us and the oceans toy with us, lapping against the edges of our precarious land. We are in the midst of wilderness, even curled up with our lovers in bed. ~ Paul Shepheard

I should tell you that honestly, on my honour of a Nearwicked, I always think in a wordworth's of that primed favourite continental poet, Daunty, Gouty and Shopkeeper, A.G., whom the generality admoyers in this that is and that this is to come. ~ James Joyce

He dreams he's with a very sad kid and they're in a graveyard digging some dead guy's head up and it's really important, like Continental-Emergency important, and Gately's the best digger but he's wicked hungry, like irresistibly hungry, and he's eating with both hands out of huge economy-size bags of corporate snacks so he can't really dig, while it gets later and later and the sad kid is trying to scream at Gately that the important thing was buried in the guy's head and to divert the Continental Emergency to start digging the guy's head up before it's too late, but the kid moves his mouth but nothing comes out and Joelle van D. appears with wings and no underwear and asks if they knew him, the dead guy with the head, and Gately starts talking about knowing him even though deep down he feels panic because he's got no idea who they're talking about, while the sad kid holds something terrible up by the hair and makes the face of somebody shouting in panic: TOO LATE. ~ David Foster Wallace

If Continental tea is like a faded yellow telegraph form, in these islands to the west of Ostend it has the dark, glimmering tones of Russian icons, before the milk gives it a color similar to the complexion of an overfed baby; on the Continent weak tea is served in fragile porcelain, here it is casually poured into thick earthenware cups from battered metal teapots, a heavenly brew to restore the traveler, dirt cheap too. ~ Heinrich Boll

To realize the Enlightenment ideals of formal equality, the rule of law, freedom of commerce, and religious toleration, Voltaire and many of the other philosophes looked to absolutist monarchs, whose policies they hoped to influence. The support of the philosophes for the expansion of the monarch's sovereign power was tactical. It arose not out of a principled belief in the throne, but out of the recognition that only a strong monarchy had the power to override the resistance to enlightened legislation by the privileged churches, estates, and corporations that made up continental European society. (p. 45) ~ Jerry Z. Muller

EXPENSIVE CARS The most expensive chassis on the British market is the 45-50 h.p. Rolls-Royce and the 50 h.p. double-six Daimler, the prices of both of which range from £1850. Complete cars, of course, vary in price according to the coachwork fitted, but one of the standard models of the 50 h.p. Daimler is an enclosed drive model with a fixed head, listed at prices ranging from £2500. Special coachwork jobs cost as much as £1200 to £1300 on other chassis, bringing the total price up to £3000 or more. There are also, of course, Continental chassis which sell at the same price, but the Import duty partly accounts for their high prices. These include the 45 h.p. Hispano-Suiza chassis (£1950), and Isotta Frasbin sports (£1850); super sports, (£1950). Another expensive English chassis is the 40 h.p. Lancaster (£1800). The Argus ~ Sulari Gentill

Top management as a function and as a structure was first developed by Georg Siemens (1839-1901) in Germany between 1870 and 1880, when he designed and built the Deutsche Bank and made it, within a very few years, into continental Europe's leading and most dynamic financial institution. ~ Peter Drucker

San Narciso was a name; an incident among our climatic records of dreams and what dreams became among our accumulated daylight, a moment's squall-line or tornado's touchdown among the higher, more continental solemnities - storm-systems of group suffering and need, prevailing winds of affluence. There was the true continuity, San Narciso had no boundaries. No one knew yet how to draw them. She had dedicated herself, weeks ago, to making sense of what Inverarity had left behind, never suspecting that the legacy was America. ~ Thomas Pynchon

Please?" asked the girl.

"I AM BUSY. I AM TRYING TO FIX CONTINENTAL DRIFT."

"I…didn't know it was broken."

Uriel's face became more animated, his speech faster.

"IT HAS BEEN BROKEN FOR FIVE WEEKS AND FIVE DAYS. I THINK IT BROKE WHEN I RELOADED NEW ZEALAND FROM A BACKUP COPY, BUT I DO NOT KNOW WHY. MY SYNCHRONIZATION WAS IMPECCABLE AND THE CHANGE PROPAGATED SIMULTANEOUSLY ACROSS ALL SEPHIROT. I THINK SOMEBODY BOILED A GOAT IN ITS MOTHER'S MILK. IT IS ALWAYS THAT. I KEEP TELLING PEOPLE NOT TO DO IT, BUT NOBODY LISTENS. ~ Scott Alexander

An alliance with France was enlisted in the war for independence from Britain, then loosened in the aftermath, as France undertook revolution and embarked on a European crusade in which the United States had no direct interest. When President Washington, in his 1796 Farewell Address - delivered in the midst of the French revolutionary wars - counseled that the United States "steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world" and instead "safely trust to temporary alliances for extraordinary emergencies," he was issuing not so much a moral pronouncement as a canny judgment about how to exploit America's comparative advantage: the United States, a fledgling power safe behind oceans, did not have the need or the resources to embroil itself in continental controversies over the balance of power. ~ Henry Kissinger

From the 15th century to 1688, England and Wales, like Scotland, had been peripheral kingdoms in the European power game, more often at war with each other that with Continental powers, and - except under Oliver Cromwell - scarcely very successful on those occasions when they did engage the Dutch, or the French, or the Spanish. ~ Linda Colley

You know you're like, my hero, right? ~ Stuart Stutzman

The typical analytic complaint about continental philosophy is that it is unrigorous, muddleheaded, subjectivist, inattentive to science, and written in impenetrable prose. The typical continental complaint about analytic philosophy is that it is superficial, reductionistic, anal retentive, inattentive to human concerns, and boring. ~ Edward Feser

Since 1775, when the first Continental Congress called for a national day of prayer, there have been such events called for by almost every President. I saw the figures - 34 out of 44 Presidents have called for a national day of prayer. Some of those who didn't have died in office. ~ James Dobson

With regard to military discipline, I may safely say that no such thing existed in the Continental Army. ~ Friedrich Wilhelm Von Steuben

This African American Vernacular English shares most of its grammar and vocabulary with other dialects of English. But it is distinct in many ways, and it is more different from standard English than any other dialect spoken in continental North America. ~ William Labov

The Eurozone has clearly gone spectacularly wrong, pulling down all the continental economies. ~ Timothy Garton Ash

All those happy, pretty, successful people- he hated them because he knew they didn't really exist, and he hated even more the magazine that glorified them and in a way that made them exist, actors, rock musicians, famous writers, politicians. Those aren't people, he fumed, they're photographs. ~ Russell Banks

Memory is igneous more than ingenious, igneous, and like granite, intrusive, heaved up within oneself, the whole range of one's life, mountains' forbidding height looming over the plains where one lives, mountains formed by the life already lived, but toward which one is always walking, one's own past ahead of him, seeking the improbable path already forged, this path back through oneself, this path we call the present tense, which becomes the continental divide when the tense shifts and the path is lost, path from which the walker emerges only to turn around and see the peaks pulled up by his feet, and the snowy pass, and alpine heights, where those stranded must sometime feed on themselves to survive, where sometimes, through the icy crust, the crocus blooms. ~ Dan Beachy-Quick

solve the nation's debt crisis. The task was daunting. The country had been living on expedients since 1775; the Continental Congress had more creditors than any other regime in the world and no means of payment.When Hamilton totaled how much the country owed, it was staggering: foreign debt alone amounted to $11 million, plus $1.6 million in interest. ~ George C. Daughan

We get twitted now and then on how we made this country. Well, we took the whole business, of course. It's not just that corner that we took from Mexico. When we got it all together, we got a very shapely country-the best continental cut in all the world, between the two oceans and in the right temperature zone. ~ Robert Frost

Henry liked to put to himself when he was a schoolboy: what are the chances of this particular fish, from that shoal, off that continental shelf ending up in the pages of this copy of the Daily Mirror? Something just short of infinity to one. Similarly, the grains of sand on a beach, arranged just so. The random ordering of the world, the unimaginable odds against any particular condition, still please him. Even as a child, and especially after Aberfan, he never believed in fate or providence, or the future being made by someone in the sky. Instead, at every instant, a trillion trillion possible futures; the pickiness of pure chance and physical laws seemed like freedom from the scheming of a gloomy god. ~ Ian McEwan

If Kris could play enough of these, in the right order, without stopping, she could block out everything: the dirty snow that never melted, closets full of secondhand clothes, overheated classrooms at Independence High, mind-numbing lectures about the Continental Congress and ladylike behavior and the dangers of of running with the wrong crowd and what x equals and how to find for y and what the third person plural for cantar is and what Holden Caulfield's basement glove symbolizes and what the whale symbolizes and what the green light symbolizes and what everything in the world symbolizes, because apparently nothing is what it seems and everything is a trick. ~ Grady Hendrix

Continental directors, as opposed to British and American, tend to be somewhat high-handed in their approach. ~ Donald Pleasence

Being pool-trained, I'm used to seeing four sides and a bottom. When that clarity is removed I get nervous. I imagine things. Sharks, the slippery sides of large fish, shaggy pieces of sunken frigates, dark corroded iron, currents. I can swim along the shore, my usual stroke rolled and tipped by the waves, the ribbed sandy bottom wiggling beneath me, but eventually I get spooked by the open-ended horizon, the cloudy blue thought of that sheer drop-the continental shelf. ~ Leanne Shapton

My color schemes were limited to what would go with the pewter-gray gown ... except for the bridesmaids' gowns. I'd already decided that they were going to be a distinctly nonmatchy lemon yellow that Jolene's aunt Vonnie would have to special-order. The kind of yellow one would find on takeout menus or particularly urgent Post-it notes.
In fact, if the outdoor lighting failed, we could use the color of their dresses to illuminate the ceremony.
And yes, i had to use a vendor who hated me, because Vonnie held the only pattern left in the continental United States for the "Ruffle and Dreams," the very dress I'd had to wear in Jolene's wedding. Revenge would would be mine, for a few months, until i revealed the dove-gray bridesmaids' dresses i actually planned for them to wear. ~ Molly Harper

On July 2nd, 1776, after the failure of all attempts to reconcile with England, the Continental Congress passed the resolution proposed by Richard Henry Lee for independence. ~ Darwyn Hassert

Continental Drift

you have moved through
like an ice flow-
steady slow substantial

tumble of glacial tongue
sweeping through
valleys reshaped

you arrived on your own epic time
patient and thorough
meltwater firn crevasse and all

lifting rocks on shifting plates
smoothing edges
and moving the very axes of my teeth

you soothed over rifts and fault lines
leaving me
newly minted

peaked and ridged
steep and crested
sloped and spurred

Hillsides lush
and summits glistening
I rush to a new dawn

but not without raw traces
of your tender era
scratched warmly on my every acre ~ Nancy Boutilier

One of the major Lockhart restaurants, Kreuz Market, ships to anywhere in the continental United States. ~ Tyler Cowen

'Battleship' is not a film that Francois Truffaut would have made. Nor would any of those other namby-pamby European directors. Nope, this picture eschews that Continental obsession with small stories, set in quaint towns filled with pockmarked folk doing their banal things. ~ Seth Shostak

Panting like a marathon runner at mile twenty, overheated bloodhound, steam engine crawling up the Continental Divide. ~ Dennis Vickers

Colonization would make of Germany a continental empire fit to rival the United States, another hardy frontier state based upon exterminatory colonialism and slave labor. The East was the Nazi Manifest Destiny. In Hitler's view, "in the East a similar process will repeat itself for a second time as in the conquest of America." As Hitler imagined the future, Germany would deal with the Slavs much as the North Americans had dealt with the Indians. The Volga River in Russia, he once proclaimed, will be Germany's Mississippi.9 ~ Timothy Snyder

In politics continental Europe was infantile - horrifying. What America lacked, for all its political stability, was the capacity to enjoy intellectual pleasures as though they were sensual pleasures. This is what Europe offered, or was said to offer. ~ Saul Bellow

China is one of those vast, continental conglomerates that ... I mean, if they were to start a tourist trade in China, they'd just bus people in from another province, you know what I mean? They're very self-contained. ~ Damon Albarn

For nine miles along a submerged ridge, the corals rise in lumpy hillocks that spread out 100 yards or more, resembling heaped scoops of rainbow sherbet and Neapolitan ice cream. The mounds, some 100 feet tall, sprout delicate treelike gorgonians that sift currents for a plankton meal. Fish, worms and other creatures dart or crawl in every crevice. This description could apply to thousands of coral reefs in shallow, sun-streaked tropical waters from Australia to the Bahamas. But this is the Sula Ridge, 1,000 feet down in frigid darkness on the continental shelf 100 miles off Norway's coast. ~ James Dwight Dana

We have a festering mass of human wretchedness in all our great towns, which is the natural hotbed of such anarchical movements: all the great continental countries are full of this explosive material. Can we depend on our country keeping free from the infection when we have far more poverty in our midst than the neighbouring European States? ~ Edward R.B. Pease

I say is someone in there?' The voice is the young post-New formalist from
Pittsburgh who affects Continental and wears an ascot that won't stay tight, with that
hesitant knocking of when you know perfectly well someone's in there, the
bathroom door composed of thirty-six that's three times a lengthwise twelve
recessed two-bevelled squares in a warped rectangle of steam-softened wood, not
quite white, the bottom outside corner right here raw wood and mangled from
hitting the cabinets' bottom drawer's wicked metal knob, through the door and
offset 'Red' and glowering actors and calendar and very crowded scene and pubic
spirals of pale blue smoke from the elephant-colored rubble of ash and little
blackened chunks in the foil funnel's cone, the smoke's baby-blanket blue that's sent
her sliding down along the wall past knotted washcloth, towel rack, blood-flower
wallpaper and intricately grimed electrical outlet, the light sharp bitter tint of a heated
sky's blue that's left her uprightly fetal with chin on knees in yet another North
American bathroom, deveiled, too pretty for words, maybe the Prettiest Girl Of All
Time (Prettiest G.O.A.T.), knees to chest, slew-footed by the radiant chill of the
claw-footed tub's porcelain, Molly's had somebody lacquer the tub in blue, lacquer,
she's holding the bottle, recalling vividly its slogan for the past generation was The
Choice of a Nud ~ David Foster Wallace

History likewise shows that sometimes the 'monetary standard of the victors' can prove to be very bad. There have seldom been more brilliant victories than those eventually achieved by the American insurgents under Washington against the English troops. But the American 'continental dollar did not benefit from them. The more proudly the star-spangled banner rose on high, the lower did the exchange-rate fall, until, at the very moment when the victory of the rebels was secured, the dollar became entirely valueless. The course of events was no different not long afterwards in France. In spite of the victories of the revolutionary army, the metal premium rose. ~ Ludwig Von Mises

An unpleasant odour would not be objected to, it is not objected to now in many continental hotels. ~ H.G.Wells

I had four hundred thousand pages of continental philosophy and lit theory in my head. And by God, I was going to use it to prove to him that I was smarter than he was. ~ David Foster Wallace

I no longer require your services." With her head held high, she strode for the door.
Hell and blazes, he wouldn't let her do this! Now when he knew what was at stake.
"You don't want to hear my report?" he called out after her.
She paused near the door. "I don't believe you even have a report."
"I certainly do, a very thorough one. I've only been waiting for my aunt to transcribe my scrawl into something decipherable. Give me a day, and I can offer you names and addresses and dates, whatever you require."
"A day? Just another excuse to put me off so you can wreak more havoc." She stepped into the doorway, and he hurried to catch her by the arm and drag her around to face him.
He ignored the withering glance she cast him. "The viscount is twenty-two years your senior," he said baldly.
Her eyes went wide. "You're making that up."
"He's aged very well, I'll grant you, but he's still almost twice your age. Like many vain Continental gentlemen, he dyes his hair and beard-which is why he appears younger than you think."
That seemed to shake her momentarily. Then she stiffened. "All right, so he's an older man. That doesn't mean he wouldn't make a good husband."
"He's an aging roué, with an invalid sister. The advantages in a match are all his. You'd surely end up taking care of them both. That's probably why he wants to marry you."
"You can't be sure of that."
"No? He's already choosing not to stay here for the house part ~ Sabrina Jeffries

Continental people have a sex life; the English have hot-water bottles. ~ George Mikes

Where may one breathe?" demands one Continental Macaroni, in a yellow waistcoat, " - in New-York, Taverns have rooms where Smoke is prohibited." "Tho' clearly," replies the itinerant Stove-Salesman Mr. Whitpot, drawing vigorously at his Pipe, "what's needed is a No-Idiots Area. ~ Thomas Pynchon

So, the moral of that story, other than never underestimate an independent bookseller, was that the Continental Army and its commander in chief had a soft spot for Chief Artillery Officer Henry Knox. ~ Sarah Vowell

What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier, returning to the range, admire?

Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator's projection: its unplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides: its subsidence after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar icecaps, arctic and antarctic: its climatic and commercial significance: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability of its primeval basin: its luteofulvous bed: its capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all soluble substances including millions of tons of the most precious metals: its slow erosions of peninsulas and islands, its persistent formation of homothetic islands, peninsulas and downwardtending promontories: its alluvial deposits: its weight and volume and density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns: its gradation of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones: its vehicular ramifications in continental lakecontained streams and c ~ James Joyce

Middle-earth is our world. I have (of course) placed the action in a purely imaginary (though not wholly impossible) period of antiquity, in which the shape of the continental masses was different. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

The older America, until the 1890s and in some respects until 1914, was wrapped in the security of continental isolation, village society, the Protestant denominations, and a flourishing industrial capitalism. But reluctantly, year by year, over several decades, it has been drawn into the twentieth century and forced to cope with its unpleasant realities: first the incursions of cosmopolitanism and skepticism, then the disappearance of American isolation and easy military security, the collapse of traditional capitalism and its supplementation by a centralized welfare state, finally the unrelenting costs and stringencies of the Second World War, the Korean War, and the cold war. As a consequence, the heartland of America, filled with people who are often fundamentalist in religion, nativist in prejudice, isolationist in foreign policy, and conservative in economics, has constantly rumbled with an underground revolt against all these tormenting manifestations of our modern predicament. ~ Richard Hofstadter

Even if Zuma was to develop the authoritarian impulses of a Mugabe, he would be checked - not least by his own party, which set a continental precedent by ousting Thabo Mbeki in 2007, after it felt he had outstayed his welcome by seeking a third term as party president. The ANC appears to have set itself against that deathtrap of African democracy: the ruler for life. ~ Mark Gevisser

You know you're in a college town when there's a restaurant called "Pancakea." The establishment was a pancake/coffee house, and Choo, Molly, Sig, and I were sitting in a booth arguing about the place and its name and their relative merits. I thought the name was a take on panacea, implying that pancakes are a cure for everything. Sig thought the owner wanted the place to become the IKEA of pancakes. Molly thought that given how large the pancakes were, the title might be a riff on Pangea, the first continental landmass. We all agreed that the owner was probably an ex-college student who couldn't get a job with his or her major, but we couldn't agree on whether that major was philosophy, marketing, anthropology, or just heavy drinking. ~ Elliott James

Continental three-dollar bill, designed by Benjamin Franklin. An eagle fights a crane, with the motto "Exitus in dubio est," "The outcome is in doubt. ~ Kathleen DuVal

That we can now think of no mechanism for astrology is relevant but unconvincing. No mechanism was known, for example, for continental drift when it was proposed by Wegener. Nevertheless, we see that Wegener was right, and those who objected on the grounds of unavailable mechanism were wrong. ~ Carl Sagan

That there would be a political advantage in having the declaration written by a Virginian was clear, for the same reason there had been political advantage in having the Virginian Washington in command of the army. But be that as it may, Jefferson, with his "peculiar felicity of expression," as Adams said, was the best choice for the task, just as Washington had been the best choice to command the Continental Army, and again Adams had played a key part. Had his contributions as a member of Congress been only that of casting the two Virginians in their respective, fateful roles, his service to the American cause would have been very great. ~ David McCullough

The earth's crust has not yet stopped heaving and plunging under our feet. Mountain ranges are still being thrust up on the horizon. Granites are still growing under the continental masses. Nor has the organic world ceased to produce new buds at the tips of its countless branches. ~ Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

A great number of soundings, mainly along the continental slope of the New England States were also taken by the vessels of the United States Fish Commission. Important soundings were made by the United States Fish Commission steamer ALBATROSS in the Caribbean, during the winter of 1883-1884. ~ Alexander Agassiz

In virtually every Continental state at this time, aristocracies had to live with the risk that their property might be pillaged or confiscated. Only in Great Britain did it prove possible to float the idea that aristocratic property was in some magical and strictly intangible way the people's property also. The fact that hundreds of thousands of men and women today are willing to accept that privately owned country houses and their contents are part of Britain's national heritage is one more proof of how successfully the British elite reconstructed its cultural image in an age of revolution. ~ Linda Colley

Three dominant hypotheses explain what drives plate tectonic motion. Each one relies on the convention of the mantle - the movement of heated rock materials beneath earth's crust - but each one focuses on a different piece of the cycle: Mantle convection hypothesis: This hypothesis proposes that heated materials inside the earth move up and down in a circular motion (like the wax in a lava lamp) and the continental plates resting on this mat-erial are moved in the direction of the circular motion. Ridge-push hypothesis: This hypothesis states that the creation of new rock materials along mid-ocean ridges continually pushes oceanic crustal plates upward and outward, so that the far edges are forced into collisions with other plates. Slab-pull hypothesis: This hypothesis is the opposite of the ridge-push model. It proposes that the heavy, dense outer edges of crustal plates sink into the mantle at plate boundaries and pull the rest of the plate along with them. ~ Alecia M. Spooner

Let us work toward greater cooperation with all Caribbean Countries, whether we speak English, Dutch, French or Spanish, whether we are independent or not, and whether we be island or continental territories. ~ Said Musa

It was not as if the rest of the nation was suffering from want. .. Americans were experiencing a war-related economic boom. these same citizens might be enjoying an unusual level of prosperity, but they were not aboutto share it with their struggling national government and their even more beleaguered army. Without an ability to raise its own taxes, the Continental Congress had been printing its own money to pay for the war. But after five years of churning out bills that had become almost worthless, Congress was left with few options. By the spring of 1780 every thing was beginning to grind to a terrible and tragic halt. ~ Nathaniel Philbrick