Braking For Whales Quotes

Dr. Rose has an accurate but tragic assessment of the plight of SeaWorld’s orcas. “I personally think,” she says, “all captive orcas, whether caught in the wild or born in captivity, are behaviorally abnormal. They are like the children in Lord of the Flies—unnaturally violent because they do not have any of the normal societal brakes on their immature tendency toward violence. Children can be very violent, but under normal circumstances, they are socialized to suppress that violence and channel it productively as they mature.

Dead leaves scatter, caught and swirling in smoky exhaust. Now the hiss of hydraulic brakes, the ticking blinker, the whine of straining gears as the bus disappears down the city hill like some mechanical land-whale sounding in a concrete sea. A young soldier stands alone on the curb. She thumbs her earbuds in, cranks her music up, slings her service pack on and walks the empty morning sidewalk toward home. Passing a pawnshop, she spots her reflection in the glass and stops to look—Taller, broader, her hair shorter than before—she isn’t sure who she is, who she has become. All she knows for sure is she isn’t who she was when she left. Nobody is, and nobody ever will be. The streets are quiet, even for the early hour. A digital clock on an unfinished bank building behind her blinks mindlessly, the red numbers reversed in the glass. She’s turning to read the time when she’s caught by the flash. A bright magnesium burn in the corner of the gray sky. Bright and then brighter. Then the heat hits. She stiffens, her skin crawling with searing pain. Weightless now, she’s floating above the blinding street, a garbage can suspended beside her, its contents already aflame. When she hits

Millie’s car cornered like a beached whale, and the brakes required brute force to get them to—you know—stop. It explained a lot about my aunt’s driving style. The

Oh God!” Leigh cried out with pain, and then snapped bitterly, “Why do we women have to have the babies? Men should have them. What did we ever do to deserve this?” “Eve ate the apple,” Justin responded, braking and shifting the van into park. “Shut up, Justin, or I swear I’ll shove an apple up your—” “Ow, ow, ow,” Valerie cried out as Leigh nearly pulverized the bones in her fingers. “Sorry,” Leigh muttered, releasing her fingers. “I was trying not to squeeze too tight.” “That’s okay,” Valerie said weakly. “I’ll go get Etienne and Rachel,” Justin announced, opening the door. “I don’t think we’re going to be able to get Leigh in the house without help.” “That’s because I’m a beached whale,” Leigh moaned, suddenly sounding teary. “No, honey,” Valerie said quickly. “He’s just worried about you having a contraction while we’re walking you in. It’s better if we have someone to help us carry you in.” Leigh snorted with disbelief, all sign of tears gone and irritation in their place again. “Justin could carry me with one hand. He’s just scared I’ll bite him or something.

Any fanciful ambition involves an overloaded opinion of my own capability, a wrong evaluation in an upward direction. If, for example, my dream is to become one of the great philosophers of the world, then my fanciful ambition might be to solve the problem of time. Why is it dangerous to nourish such ambitions? Because the precious mirage of ‘I’m going to do’ gets in the way of ‘I do’. The fanciful ambition is thus the project that prevents you from doing. An example would be the project of reading the works of the great thinkers in the most fundamental way. This is a fanciful ambition, because there can be no definitive reading of the great philosophers. This time it is no longer a matter of personal projection: I start with myself and see myself as a great hero. This time we are dealing with a mystification at the level of action. He who nourishes fanciful ambitions is a man of action sabotaged by his own project of doing. He sets out to do in his own space something that he cannot do. He wants to catch a whale with a flimsy fishing line. It is the very grandeur of his project that puts the brakes on its achievement. This lack of adjustment to one’s own possibilities is another source of failure. In my generation there was a guy called Ştefan Teodorescu who was always making up ample tables of contents. He never even got as far as writing the introduction. However the nourisher of fanciful ambitions is not an agonized failure; his life becomes a dolce far niente, a sort of continuous waltz among a host of projects endlessly taken up and abandoned again. There is a Chinese proverb: ‘Every road starts with the fi rst step’. The nourisher of fanciful ambitions never manages to make that fi rst step. Or if he does, he leaves the road before he has trodden firmly on it.