See the cat? See the cradle?
There are a finite number of symbols we accept as letters, and from those, a finite number of combinations we accept as words. Grammar aside, I'm continually amazed by the various orders these words turn up in, and will log my favorite quotes that I encounter here.
The Andromeda Strain
“Hall said, ‘What are my chances?’
‘They don’t exist,’ Stone explained.”
-Michael Crichton
Prey
“Things never turn out the way you think they will.”
-Michael Crichton
Prey
“We think our bodies are solid, but that’s only because we can’t see what is going on at the cellular level. If you could enlarge the human body, blow it up to a vast size, you would see that it was literally nothing but a swirling mass of cells and atoms, clustered together into smaller swirls of cells and atoms.”
-Michael Crichton
Prey
“Most people imagined evolution to be a one-time-only process, a confluence of chance events. If plants hadn’t started making oxygen, animal life would never have evolved. If an asteroid hadn’t wiped out the dinosaurs, mammals would never have taken over. If some fish hadn’t come onto land, we’d all still be in the water. And so on.
All that was true enough, but there was another side of evolution, too. Certain forms, and certain ways of life, kept appearing again and again. For example, parasitism-one animal living off another-had evolved independently many times in the course of evolution. Parasitism was a reliable way for life-forms to interact; and it kept reemerging.”
-Michael Crichton
Prey
“If you compressed the history of life on earth into twenty-four hours, then multicellular organisms appeared in the last twelve hours, dinosaurs in the last hour, the earliest men in the last forty seconds, and modern men less than one second ago.”
-Michael Crichton
Prey
“We think we know what we are doing. We have always thought so. We never seem to acknowledge that we have been wrong in the past, and so might be wrong in the future. Instead, each generation writes off earlier errors as the result of bad thinking by less able minds - and then confidently embarks on fresh errors of its own.”
-Michael Chricton
Mother Night
“Future civilizations- better civilizations than this one- are going to judge all men by the extent to which they’ve been artists. You and I, if some future archaeologist finds our works miraculously preserved in some city dump, will be judged by the quality of our creations. Nothing else about us will matter.”
-Kurt Vonnegut
Mother Night
“He once told me, in all sincerity, that the greatest contribution America had made to the world, a contribution that would be remembered for thousands of years, was the invention of A.A.”
-Kurt Vonnegut
Mother Night
“History often goes hand-in-hand with sports.”
-Kurt Vonnegut
Mother Night
“No young person on earth is so excellent in all respects as to need no uncritical love. Good Lord- as youngsters play their parts in political tragedies with casts of billions, uncritical love is the only real treasure they can look for.”
-Kurt Vonnegut
