David Stove Quotes

Its funny how certain objects convey a message -- my washer and dryer, for example. They can't speak, of course, but whenever I pass them they remind me that I'm doing fairly well. "No more laundromat for you," they hum. My stove, a downer, tells me every day that I can't cook, and before I can defend myself my scale jumps in, shouting from the bathroom, "Well, he must be doing something. My numbers are off the charts." The skeleton has a much more limited vocabulary and says only one thing: "You are going to die.

His mother had gone cold when Arthur died; her grief for him was fixed. But this had not stopped her from taking pleasure in life, it now occurred to Ishmael. There she stood at the stove ladling soup with the calm ease of one who feels there is certainly such a thing as grace.

Warm your body by healthful exercise, not by cowering over a stove.

The first thing you see, covering yards and yards of one wall, is an object that looks like a nickel-plated nuclear reactor, but is really the stove.

it turned out that there was something terribly stressful about visual telephone interfaces that hadn't been stressful at all about voice-only interfaces. Videophone consumers seemed suddenly to realize that they'd been subject to an insidious but wholly marvelous delusion about conventional voice-only telephony. They'd never noticed it before, the delusion... ...A traditional aural-only conversation.. ...let you enter a kind of highway-hypnotic semi-attentive fugue: while conversing, you could look around the room, doodle, fine-groom, peel tiny bits of dead skin away from your cuticles, compose phone-pad haiku, stir things on the stove; you could even carry on a whole separate additional sign-language-and-exagerrated-facial-expression type of conversation with peoople right there in the room with you, all while seemingg to be right there attending closely to the voice on the phone. And yet even as you were dividing your attention between the phone call and all sorts of other idle little fuguelike activities, you were somehow never haunted by the suspicion that the person on the other end's attention might be similarly divided.

We set ourselves to achieve a society which would be maximally-tolerant. But that resolve not only gives maximum scope to the activities of those who have set themselves to achieve the maximally-intolerant society. It also, and more importantly, paralyzes our powers of resistance to them.

Between a cold kitchen window gone opaque with the stove’s wet heat and the breath of us, an open drawer, and the gilt ferrotype of identical boys flanking a blind vested father which hung in a square recession above the wireless’s stand, my Mum stood and cut off my long hair in the uneven heat.

The stove not only took up room and scented the house, but it concealed the fire, and I felt as if I had lost a companion. You can always see a face in the fire.

But what sent his face clear down off his skull and broke him in two, though, was he said when he saw the Pam-shiny empty biscuit pan on top of the stove and the plastic rind of the peanut butter’s safety-seal wrap on top of the wastebasket’s tall pile. The little locket-picture in the back of his head swelled and became a sharp-focused scene of his wife and little girl and little unborn child eating what he now could see they must have eaten, last night and this morning, while he was out ingesting their groceries and rent. This was his cliff-edge, his personal intersection of choice, standing there loose-faced in the kitchen, running his finger around a shiny pan with not one little crumb of biscuit left in it. He sat down on the kitchen tile with his scary eyes shut tight but still seeing his little girl’s face. They’d ate some charity peanut butter on biscuits washed down with tapwater and a grimace.

I am not a terribly physical person. Helen wasn't either. We'd never hugged or even shaken hands, so it was odd to find myself rubbing her bare shoulder and then her back. It was, I though, like stroking some sort of sea creature, the flesh slick and fatty beneath my palms. In my memory, there was something on the stove, a cauldron of tomato gravy, and the smell of it mixed with the camphor of the Tiger Balm. The windows were steamed, Tony Bennett was on the radio, and saying, 'Please,' her voice catching on the newness of the word, Helen asked me to turn it up.

Leila’s particular sensitivities seemed to cycle between the wafty, closer smells—mainly food and human—that draped over a moment, and the dusty, distant smells that could be carried by coat sleeve or breeze. In the former category was the knapsack that still smelled of curry, the hairbrush left too near the stove, and the human hangover behind the counter at Kinko’s. In the latter category was the subway-tunnel vent mixed with newspaper that had snaked around her corner in Bushwick, and the tang of handrails, and the seep of wet gravel, but it also included the thinner smells that came from paper and paint and industrially produced hard surfaces.

But there is one fact which does emerge from human history with unvarying insistence, and it is a fact which is fatal to the Malthus-Darwin theory: that the natural rate of human increase is repressed the more, not where the misery due to famine, war, and pestilence falls more heavily, but precisely where it falls more lightly.

Defects of empirical knowledge have less to do with the ways we go wrong in philosophy than defects of character do: such things as the simple inability to shut up; determination to be thought deep; hunger for power; fear, especially the fear of an indifferent universe

My brother Francis wrote a letter in Greek to the headmasters of private schools, selling cooking stoves. When some wrote back that they could not read Greek, he sent them another letter – in Latin. This produced orders.

There are other beliefs which, though disproved countless times, never die out, because they appeal, not to something in everyone, but to a certain perennial type of person. An example is, the belief that everyone is at bottom selfish, or that no one ever acts intentionally except from motives of self-interest. There is a perennial human type to whom this belief is peculiarly and irresistibly congenial. It is almost never a woman. It is a kind of man who is deficient in generous or even disinterested impulses himself, and knows it, but keeps up his self-esteem by thinking that everyone else is really in the same case. He prides himself, both on having the perspicacity to realise, what most people disguise even from themselves, that everyone is selfish, and on having the uncommon candour not to conceal this unpleasant home truth. Who has not met people of this type? In the Australian-English of 50 years ago, there was a wonderful expression for this kind of man: he was said to be 'as flash as a rat with a gold tooth

Parish affairs and town affairs overlapped substantially. Church and state were not officially separated in Massachusetts until 1834, and as late as that date is, Concord did not comply with the new law until 1856. The church was no longer the only social force in town. When Emerson moved there, Concord had an exclusive group called the Social Circle, limited to twenty-five members, which went back to 1778 (and which still continues), and a library that had been started in 1794 and reorganized in 1821. There was a Female Charitable Society and a Society for the Suppression of Intemperance, both dating from 1814. By Emerson’s time there was a strong antislavery society, in which Cynthia Thoreau, mother of David Henry, was active. The women of Concord sent frequent petitions and memorials to the government in Washington. A lyceum was begun in 1828; it incorporated an earlier debating society. A Mozart society was founded in 1832. By 1835 Concord had sixty-six college graduates, with another four or five currently enrolled as undergraduates. The town itself had six school districts, with separate schools for boys and girls. The schoolhouses, one of which was directly across the street from the Emersons’ new house, were plain and bare, without paint or equipment. Heated by a single stove each, they were always too hot or too cold, and they struggled with an absentee rate that averaged 33 percent. There was a small, precariously maintained private academy for college-bound students.

I don’t know what got her into this kind of life. I know she isn’t made for it. She’s such a healthy girl, she’s full of living. She needs a guy. She needs a home. And kids. If they put her in prison, she’ll decay. I want to see her laughing. I want to see her bending over a stove. Wheeling a baby carriage down the street. I can’t see her behind bars. I can’t see that.

Now, why is it that the idea of intention keeps turning up in explanations of adaptation, intruding even into ones where it is supposed to have no place? And why is it as hard, as we saw in the preceding section that it is, to translate the idea of intention out of the explanation of any particular adaptation? "Surely

If "final causes" means purposes, or purposive activities, then Darwinism not only does not "expel" them: it builds them into the very foundation of its explanation of evolution. Even

New religionists, such as Williams, Dawkins, and Wilson, regard people and all other organisms as the helpless puppets, tools, or vehicles, of hidden purposive agents of more than human power and intelligence, whose only goal is to produce the largest possible number of their replicas in the next generation of organisms. But

In fact this ultimate degree of Darwinian faith, which blinds the faithful to even the most obvious facts of human life, is far commoner at present than it ever was before. But

ALTRUISM WAS, from the very start, a problem for the Darwinian theory of evolution, if not something worse than a problem. As a result, Darwinians have always been under a certain temptation to "cut the knot," and deny the very existence of altruism. This

sociobiologists are not merely willing, but devoted, "Slaves of the Gene."" They believe that an organism-a man, say-is epiphenomenal to his genes: an effect, not a cause. Or at least, they believe that a man is about as epiphenomenal to his genes, as his singlet (for example) is to him. Wilson spoke for all sociobiologists, when he said: "An organism is only DNA's way of making more DNA."24 Fourth:

Sociobiology, then, is a religion: one which has genes as its gods. Yet

Sociobiology is not incomprehensible, but it is one of the religions which are obviously false. The

Namely, that for every once that Dawkins says that genes are not purposive, he says a hundred things (many of which I have quoted) which imply that genes are purposive. And

Darwinians have always owed their readers a translation manual that would "cash" the teleological language which Darwinians avail themselves of without restraint in explaining particular adaptations, into the non-teleological language which their own theory of adaptation requires. But they have never paid, or even tried to pay, this debt.

Darwinians, then, have never paid, or even acknowledged, the debt they have all along owed the public: a reconciliation of their teleological explanations of particular adaptations with their non-teleological explanation of adaptation in general. And not only have they never paid this debt: they have in fact become progressively less conscious, with time, of the fact that they owe this debt. This

Nor have any Darwinians ever given, to this day, any such reconciliation of their theory with the teleological language which they employ as freely as though they were disciples, not of Darwin, but of Paley. Presumably

It has turned out, in fact, to be far harder to translate teleological into non-teleological language than had been anticipated by philosophers; or at any rate, by philosophers friendly towards Darwinism (as virtually all the writers in question are). Whether such translation is possible at all is more than anyone knows. As

Thibodeau wrote, “By noon, the building is a tinderbox. A thick layer of methylene chloride dust deposited by the CS gas coats the walls, floors, and ceilings, mingling with kerosene and propane vapors from our spilled lanterns and crushed heaters.… The whole place is primed like a pot-bellied stove with its damper flung open. Suddenly, someone yells—‘Fire!

Male Name-Pictures JAMES (Jim)—a Slim Jim JOHN—a toilet (my apologies to anyone named John) ROBERT (Bob)—a buoy bobbing on the water’s surface MICHAEL (Mike)—a microphone WILLIAM (Bill)—a dollar bill DAVID—a statue RICHARD—I’m sure you can think of something for this one CHARLES—a river (I’m from Boston) JOSEPH (Joe)—a cup of coffee THOMAS (Tom)—a drum CHRISTOPHER (Chris)—an “X” (like a crisscross) DANIEL (Dan)—a lion (lion’s den) PAUL—a bouncing ball MARK—a bruise (as in, “That’s gonna leave a mark!”) DONALD—a duck GEORGE—a gorge KENNETH (Ken)—a hen STEVEN (Steve)—a stove EDWARD (Ed)—a bed BRIAN—a brain RONALD (Ron)—a man running ANTHONY (Tony)—a skeleton (Bony Tony) KEVIN—the number seven JASON—a man being chased (chasin’) MATTHEW (Matt)—a welcome mat Female Name-Pictures MARY—the Virgin Mary PATRICIA (Pat)—a baseball bat LINDA—beauty crown (linda means “pretty” in Spanish) BARBARA—barbed-wire fence ELIZABETH—an ax (Lizzie Borden) JENNIFER—a heart (Jennifer Love Hewitt) MARIA—a wedding dress (as in, “I’m gonna marry ya”) SUSAN—a pair of socks (Susan sounds like “shoes and . . .”) MARGARET (Peg)—a pirate’s peg leg DOROTHY (Dot)—Dots candy LISA—the Mona Lisa NANCY—pants KAREN—a carrot BETTY—a poker chip HELEN—a demon SANDRA (Sandy)—the beach DONNA—a duck (as in, Donald) CAROL—bells (“Carol of the Bells”) RUTH—a roof SHARON—a toddler throwing a fit because she doesn’t want to share MICHELLE—a missile LAURA—an “aura” SARAH—cheerleader’s pom-poms (rah-rah!) KIMBERLY—a very burly woman named Kim DEBORAH—a bra A great way to practice this technique is to jump on Facebook and just start browsing profiles. You’ll have an endless supply of names and faces from which to try creating name-pictures and associations.