Cactus And Succulents Quotes

Futuristic as this may sound, the vision of individuals and groups as so many objects to be continuously tracked, wholly known, and shunted this way or that for some purpose of which they are unaware has a history. It was coaxed to life nearly sixty years ago under the warm equatorial sun of the Galapagos Islands, when a giant tortoise stirred from her torpor to swallow a succulent chunk of cactus into which a dedicated scientist had wedged a small machine. It was a time when scientists reckoned with the obstinacy of free-roaming animals and concluded that surveillance was the necessary price of knowledge. Locking these creatures in a zoo would only eliminate the very behavior that scientists wanted to study, but how were they to be surveilled? The solutions once concocted by scholars of elk herds, sea turtles, and geese have been refurbished by surveillance capitalists and presented as an inevitable feature of twenty-first-century life on Earth. All that has changed is that now we are the animals

My mother always told me that a woman is like a cactus; succulent and pleasing to the eye but if you touch one, you will suffer a rending of the flesh and subsequent poisoning of the mind, body and nervous system leaving you foaming in the dirt like a rabid dog [sic].

What she had instead was a share in a mass burial site, marked by a big granite tombstone engraved with the words: WHOMEVER​FOREVER WHEREVER REST IN PEACE This stone, at least, was in better shape than most of the others. It looked like it got cleaned once in a while, despite the mildew and bird shit; there were even a few remembrances at its base: an American flag, a cluster of plastic roses. Shawn leaned a tiny potted succulent against the stone and closed his eyes. When he was little—between one and three years old, they never did quite nail it down—Ava made him high-five a cactus. She set it up with a series of high fives that had him chasing her hand like a cat chases a light. Up high, down low, too slow! For her finale, she extended her hand, palm out flat, over a potted cactus, and when he slammed down as fast and eager as he could, she whisked her hand away.

THE ISLAND’S first residents were a remarkably antisocial tribe known as the Karankawas. The Karankawas patrolled a 350-mile stretch of coastline from the Rio Grande to Galveston Bay, but they lived about half the year on the Island. Except when they were raiding other villages, stealing maidens to marry and children to eat, the Karankawas went out of their way to avoid contact with other tribes. They were one of the few coastal tribes that refused to take part in the Truce of the Tunas, an annual spring mingling of otherwise hostile tribes in South Texas. When the sweet purple fruit of the prickly pear cactus—the “tunas”—ripened each May, Indians from all along the coast declared a truce. They put away their tools and their weapons of war and migrated to the scrubby cactus and mesquite country near the present town of Alice. There they gorged themselves on the succulent fruit, danced, frolicked, and generally conducted themselves like fools rather than warriors for as long as the fruit lasted.