Strunk And White Quotes

At that time my notions of nuclear power were utterly idyllic. At school and at the university we'd been taught that this was a magical factory that made "energy out of nothing," where people in white robes sat and pushed buttons. Chernobyl blew up when we weren't prepared. ~ Svetlana Alexievich

I'll tell you an incident that happened right at the Brown Derby [restaurant] since I've been here in Honolulu," Armstrong tells a friend on one of the recordings. "You remember that white boy, he's a sailor or something, on one of these battleships, on Pearl Harbor, and he caught my show, and I come to find out he has damn near every record I made from childbirth. "He come up and shook my hand after the whole show was over . . . and he said, 'You know, I don't like Negroes.' "Right to my [expletive] face, that [expletive] told me. And so I said, 'Well, I admire your [expletive] sincerity.' "And he said, 'I don't like Negroes, but you're one [expletive] I'm crazy about. I've got every [expletive] record.' "I've said it for years. You take the majority of white people," continued Armstrong, "they always got one [expletive] at least that they're just crazy about, [expletive]. Every white man in the world got one [expletive] at least that they just love his dirty drawers. ~ Howard Reich

In addition to the little ecosystem developing around my raft, I am constantly surrounded by a display of natural wonders. The acrobatic dorados perform beneath ballets of fluffy white clouds. The clouds glide across the sky until they join at the horizon to form whirling, flaming sunsets that are slowly doused by nightfall. Then, as if the sun had suddenly crashed, thousands of glistening galaxies are flung out into deep black night. There is no bigger sky country than the sea. But I cannot enjoy the incredible beauty around me. It lies beyond my grasp, taunting me. Knowing it can be stolen from me at any time, by a Dorado or shark attack or by a deflating raft, I cannot relax and appreciate it. It is beauty surrounded by ugly fear. I write in my log that it is a view of heaven from a seat in hell. ~ Steven Callahan

Thank you, Sabina. Oh. One more thing. Tonight, a white werewolf stuck in wolf form, one who met the angel Hayyel, ran up and bit the foot of Joses Bar-Judas. Should I be worried? ~ Faith Hunter

My mother and my father always had me in ballet and dance, and I sang in a girl's group. ~ Jessica White

In the '70s, in Britain, if you were going to do serious photography, you were obliged to work in black-and-white. Color was the palette of commercial photography and snapshot photography. ~ Martin Parr

I live 30 times faster and more intensely than most people, so every year is a whole generation for me. I'd like my combo meal with a side of long white beard, and I'd like it to go. Now, damnit! Fast food simply isn't fast enough for me. I'm so quick that I need a refill on my drink, and I haven't even taken a sip. ~ Jarod Kintz

Every journey taken always includes the path not taken, the detour through hell, the crossroads of indecision and the long way home. ~ Shannon L. Alder

You wonder what had happened, when a feller like that, in a place like that, talked of a childhood that might have as easily belonged to a millionaire, a lawyer, a schoolteacher, you. You had to think he was defective somehow, or had fucked up not once, not twice, but again and again, a peculiar resolve to his life. That was the thing, that resolve. We didn't credit it. You looked at him and your brain said he was on the losing end of one of the two bargains that America made with you. There was the romantic one, that of the rambler, the man out seeking his destiny, living by his wits, all that horseshit. Then there was the classical American dare, that you could risk all, take an internal grudge and make of it a billion dollars and get a monumental tomb in the bargain. But the truth was neither. America was a grindstone. She used those notions as twin abrasives to wear you down into a dutiful drudge walking the straight and narrow. But there was something in the hearts of the some men, some of whom became Fritz, that wouldn't accept that. These men in crummy bars, some of them, most of them, they were main-chance fellers. You could take ten of these wrecks and offer them a salesman's job, a dozen white shirts and ties, forty Gs a year and perks, a neat house on a quiet street, a yard, a car, a dog, a wife, an expense account, a Chinese laundryman, membership in a church, grandkids who'd bounce on their knees, and you'd be lucky if one or two took you up on it. And those two ~ T.D. Badyna

Yes, being black is a full-time job: sometimes you are invisible, other times you are hyper-visible," he says. "Sometimes you are welcome, other times you are not. The thermostat is always moving and you have to keep adapting to find some comfort level. Richard Pryor used to talk about going to Africa and people there telling him he was white. Even though he was black, he just wasn't black enough. ~ Paul Beatty

Poaching white fish in moderately hot oil guarantees soft-textured flesh and allows you to prepare a sauce calmly, without the usual panic about overcooking the fish. ~ Yotam Ottolenghi

There's a big overlap between conspiracy theorists, racists, gun nuts, doomsday preppers, fans of the rapture and poor white Republicans. They all have one thing in common: They feel like the oppressed underdogs. ~ Oliver Markus Malloy

Peeling an Orange

Between you and a bowl of oranges I lie nude
Reading The World's Illusion through my tears.
You reach across me hungry for global fruit,
Your bare arm hard, furry and warm on my belly.
Your fingers pry the skin of a naval orange
Releasing tiny explosions of spicy oil.
You place peeled disks of gold in a bizarre pattern
On my white body. Rearranging, you bend and bite
The disks to release further their eager scent.
I say "Stop, you're tickling," my eyes still on the page.
Aromas of groves arise. Through green leaves
Glow the lofty snows. Through red lips
Your white teeth close on a translucent segment.
Your face over my face eclipses The World's Illusion.
Pulp and juice pass into my mouth from your mouth.
We laugh against each other's lips. I hold my book
Behind your head, still reading, still weeping a little.
You say "Read on, I'm just an illusion," rolling
Over upon me soothingly, gently unmoving,
Smiling greenly through long lashes. And soon
I say "Don't stop. Don't disillusion me."
Snows melt. The mountain silvers into many a stream.
The oranges are golden worlds in a dark dream. ~ Virginia Adair

The Herb Farm reminded Marguerite of the farms in France; it was like a farm in a child's picture book. There was a white wooden fence that penned in sheep and goats, a chicken coop where a dozen warm eggs cost a dollar, a red barn for the two bay horses, and a greenhouse. Half of the greenhouse did what greenhouses do, while the other half had been fashioned into very primitive retail space. The vegetables were sold from wooden crates, all of them grown organically, before such a process even had a name- corn, tomatoes, lettuces, seventeen kinds of herbs, squash, zucchini, carrots with the bushy tops left on, spring onions, radishes, cucumbers, peppers, strawberries for two short weeks in June, pumpkins after the fifteenth of September. There was chèvre made on the premises from the milk of the goats; there was fresh butter. And when Marguerite showed up for the first time in the summer of 1975 there was a ten-year-old boy who had been given the undignified job of cutting zinnias, snapdragons, and bachelor buttons and gathering them into attractive-looking bunches. ~ Elin Hilderbrand

Tattered. Water or something more foul soaked both knees of the pants. But Thomas took all that in quickly. Most of his attention was drawn to the man's head. Thomas couldn't help but stare, mesmerized. It looked like hair had been ripped from his scalp, leaving bloody scabs in its place. His face was pallid and wet, with scars and sores everywhere. One eye was gone, a gummy red mass where it should have been. He also had no nose, and Thomas could actually see traces of the nasal passages in his skull underneath the terribly mangled skin. And his mouth. Lips drawn back in a snarl, gleaming white teeth exposed, clenched tightly together. His good eye glared, somehow vicious in the way it darted between Brenda and Thomas. Then the man said something in a wet and gurgly voice that made Thomas shiver. He spoke only a few words, but they were so absurd and out of place that it just made the whole thing that much more horrifying. Rose ~ James Dashner

Marie Calloway has a very specific literary personality that the reader is intrigued by: she's masochistic, loves to experiment, is quickly bored and intermittently self-hating, very hip, rebellious. Figuring her out is a gripping adventure. ~ Edmund White

Smile at people, pop your head into your boss's office regularly and say hello, and come to your first meeting with something really smart to say. ~ Kate White

Selling is nothing more than asking questions and waiting for an answer. ~ Jack White

The way 'Lux' was made is that there are 12 sections in here, though two of them are joined together. So there are really 11 sections, in a sense, and each one uses five notes out of a palette of seven notes, and my palette is all the white notes on the piano. That was the original palette. ~ Brian Eno

These new people are, like us, a modern invention. But unlike us, their new name has no real meaning divorced from the machinery of criminal power. The new people were something else before they were white -- Catholic, Corsican, Welsh, Mennonite, Jewish -- and if all our national hopes have any fulfillment, then they will have to be something else again. Perhaps they will truly become American and create a nobler basis for their myths. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

Allie," he said. "You told me once I had a white-knight complex. You said I saved you."
He was going to say I saved him. It was going to be so romantic.
"But the truth is," he said, "I didn't save you - I stole you. I wanted you and I knew I didn't deserve you, but I didn't care. And for some reason it seems like you
don't either, so it seems to me that I should make it permanent before you come to your senses. Will you marry me? ~ Amber Lin

The next day, as they walked, a stranger rode up, matching the Georgia-man's pace. "Niggers for sale?" He wanted to buy two women. The two men negotiated, argued, and insulted each other a little. The new man stared at the women and told them what he thought he'd do with them. The coffle kept moving. The white men rode along, bargaining. Maybe the deal could be sweetened, allowed the Georgia-man, if the South Carolinian paid to have the chains knocked off the men. One thousand dollars for the two, plus blacksmith fees. They stopped at a forge, and they kept arguing. The new man stated for everyone's benefit that he had worked African men to death in iron collars. The blacksmith came out, and he asked what "the two gentlemen were making such a frolick about," Ball later said. Frolicking: Down there, Ball realized, the Carolinians' play, the time when they were most fully themselves, was evidently when they were arguing, negotiating, dealing, and intimidating the enslaved. ~ Edward E. Baptist

I grew up in the 90s in the time of grunge when if you didn't go on stage in jeans and a T shirt you weren't 'real.' That seemed ridiculous to me. ~ Jack White

It is a strange, nonintuitive fact of existence that photons of light have no color, sound waves no sound, olfactory molecules no odors. As James Le Fanu has put it, "While we have the overwhelming impression that the greenness of the trees and the blueness of the sky are streaming through our eyes as through an open window, yet the particles of light impacting on the retina are colourless, just as the waves of sound impacting on the eardrum are silent and scent molecules have no smell. They are all invisible, weightless, subatomic particles of matter travelling through space." All the richness of life is created inside your head. What you see is not what is but what your brain tells you it is, and that's not the same thing at all. Consider a bar of soap. Has it ever struck you that soap lather is always white no matter what color the soap is? That isn't because the soap somehow changes color when it is moistened and rubbed. Molecularly, it's exactly as it was before. It's just that the foam reflects light in a different way. You get the same effect with crashing waves on a beach - greeny-blue water, white foam - and lots of other phenomena. That is because color isn't a fixed reality but a perception. ~ Bill Bryson

When they were done downloading all the information off each hard drive, they took all the computers, all the literature, and loaded everything into a big white truck and left. ~ Sherman Austin

Filters out bacteria and parasites from the blood and lymph that have been killed by white blood cells. 5) Acts as a reservoir for blood and platelets that can be released when needed (blood loss, infection, hemorrhage, and strenuous exercise). These are released via signals of epinephrine from the adrenals and sympathetics. It has been found that splenic tissue can sometimes regenerate after removal of the spleen. Howard Pearson at Yale University School of Medicine found that 13 of 22 children who had their spleens removed due to trauma had evidence of forming new splenic tissue within 1-8 years. It is hypothesized that a few old spleen cells left behind from the surgery triggered the regeneration. ~ Michael Lebowitz

You've been nothing but scared since you first entered this forest," said Wend as she put down the last of the leaves on the trap. "And when you saw me, you turned white as a ghost."

"That's not because I'm scared," said Jeskun, taking Dahkar and hiding him behind some trees. "I just--never saw anyone like you."

"You've never seen a girl?"

"No, not that," said Jeskun, frustrated.
"I've just never--you have green hair and eyes and green lashes and green freckles. It's all green, like the trees. I've never seen that."

"And you have yellow hair," said Wend, inspecting her blade, not impressed with his reasoning. "This world is full of many colors. ~ R. Janvier Del Valle

What's that?"
"My friend St. Clair bought it for me. So I wouldn't feel out of place."
She raises her eyebrows as she pulls back onto the road. "Are there a lot of Canadians in Paris?"
My face warms. "I just felt,you know, stupid for a while. Like one of those lame American tourists with the white sneakers and the cameras around their necks? So he bought it for me, so I wouldn't feel....embarrassed. American."
"Being American is nothing to be ashamed of," she snaps.
"God,Mom,I know.I just meant-forget it."
"Is this the English boy with the French father?"
"What does that have anything to do with it?" I'm angry. I don't like what she's implying. "Besides,he's American. He was born here? His mom lives in San Francisco. We sat next to each other on the plane."
We stop at a red light.Mom stares at me. "You like him."
"OH GOD,MOM."
"You do.You like this boy."
"He's just a friend.He has a girlfriend."
"Anna has a boooy-friend," Seany chants.
"I do not!"
"ANNA HAS A BOOOY-FRIEND!"
I take a sip of coffee and choke. It's disgusting. It's sludge. No, it's worse than sludge-at least sludge is organic. Seany is still taunting me. Mom reaches around and grabs his legs,which are kicking her seat again.She sees me making a face at my drink.
"My,my. Once semester in France, and suddenly we're Miss Sophisticated. Your father will be thrilled."
Like it was my choice! Like I asked to go to Paris! And how dare s ~ Stephanie Perkins

I know your brother's past. And I know that he can still find happiness even in the darkest of circumstances, because his faith sustains him. What sustains you?"
"The blood of my enemies. ~ Kiersten White

There will surely always be people with straight hair and blue eyes, as there have been for all history. But some of these straight-haired people with blue eyes have been "black," and this points to the great difference between their world and ours. We did not choose our fences. They were imposed on us by Virginia planters obsessed with enslaving as many Americans as possible. They are the ones who came up with a one-drop rule that separated the "white" from the "black," even if it meant that their own blue-eyed sons would live under the lash. The result is a people, black people, who embody all physical varieties and whose life stories mirror this physical range. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

The other cops were almost evenly divided between being scared by what they'd seen and being so impressed that it was almost worse, because I wasn't sure what they'd expect me to be able to do next time. Aimes hadn't been the only one who saw the white-shadowed outline of wings. I told them it was an answer to prayer, not me personally. I finally told one overly solicitous uniform, 'Trust me, I'm no angel.'
Nicky started laughing and couldn't seem to stop.
'Yuk it up, lion boy.'
That made him laugh harder, until he had to lean against the wall with tears trailing down from his eye. At least his laughing stopped any more weird theological questions; they just couldn't seem to talk about angels with this big, muscled bad-ass guy laughing his ass off beside me. ~ Laurell K. Hamilton

The Garden by Moonlight"

A black cat among roses,
Phlox, lilac-misted under a first-quarter moon,
The sweet smells of heliotrope and night-scented stock.
The garden is very still,
It is dazed with moonlight,
Contented with perfume,
Dreaming the opium dreams of its folded poppies.
Firefly lights open and vanish
High as the tip buds of the golden glow
Low as the sweet alyssum flowers at my feet.
Moon-shimmer on leaves and trellises,
Moon-spikes shafting through the snow ball bush.
Only the little faces of the ladies' delight are alert and staring,
Only the cat, padding between the roses,
Shakes a branch and breaks the chequered pattern
As water is broken by the falling of a leaf.
Then you come,
And you are quiet like the garden,
And white like the alyssum flowers,
And beautiful as the silent sparks of the fireflies.
Ah, Beloved, do you see those orange lilies?
They knew my mother,
But who belonging to me will they know
When I am gone. ~ Amy Lowell

17Learn to do good; commit yourselves to seeking justice. Make right for the world's most vulnerable - the oppressed, the orphaned, the widow. 18Come on now, let's walk and talk; let's work this out. Your wrongdoings are bloodred, But they can turn as white as snow. Your sins are red like crimson, But they can be made clean again like new wool. ~ Anonymous