Geography Inspirational Quotes

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To make bread or love, to dig in the earth, to feed an animal or cook for a stranger—these activities require no extensive commentary, no lucid theology. All they require is someone willing to bend, reach, chop, stir. Most of these tasks are so full of pleasure that there is no need to complicate things by calling them holy. And yet these are the same activities that change lives, sometimes all at once and sometimes more slowly, the way dripping water changes stone. In a world where faith is often construed as a way of thinking, bodily practices remind the willing that faith is a way of life.
Barbara Brown Taylor (An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith)
Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth; oh nevermind; you will not understand the power and beauty of your youth until they have faded. But trust me, in 20 years you’ll look back at photos of yourself and recall in a way you can’t grasp now how much possibility lay before you and how fabulous you really looked….You’re not as fat as you imagine. Don’t worry about the future; or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubblegum. The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind; the kind that blindside you at 4pm on some idle Tuesday. Do one thing everyday that scares you Sing Don’t be reckless with other people’s hearts, don’t put up with people who are reckless with yours. Floss Don’t waste your time on jealousy; sometimes you’re ahead, sometimes you’re behind…the race is long, and in the end, it’s only with yourself. Remember the compliments you receive, forget the insults; if you succeed in doing this, tell me how. Keep your old love letters, throw away your old bank statements. Stretch Don’t feel guilty if you don’t know what you want to do with your life…the most interesting people I know didn’t know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives, some of the most interesting 40 year olds I know still don’t. Get plenty of calcium. Be kind to your knees, you’ll miss them when they’re gone. Maybe you’ll marry, maybe you won’t, maybe you’ll have children,maybe you won’t, maybe you’ll divorce at 40, maybe you’ll dance the funky chicken on your 75th wedding anniversary…what ever you do, don’t congratulate yourself too much or berate yourself either – your choices are half chance, so are everybody else’s. Enjoy your body, use it every way you can…don’t be afraid of it, or what other people think of it, it’s the greatest instrument you’ll ever own.. Dance…even if you have nowhere to do it but in your own living room. Read the directions, even if you don’t follow them. Do NOT read beauty magazines, they will only make you feel ugly. Get to know your parents, you never know when they’ll be gone for good. Be nice to your siblings; they are the best link to your past and the people most likely to stick with you in the future. Understand that friends come and go,but for the precious few you should hold on. Work hard to bridge the gaps in geography and lifestyle because the older you get, the more you need the people you knew when you were young.
Mary Schmich
What a blessed habit I have found my prayer list, morning by morning, it takes me via the Throne of all Grace straight to the intimate personal heart of each one mentioned here, and I know that He Who is not prescribed by time and geography answers immediately.
Oswald Chambers
Geography and mileage mean nothing. Separate is a single word that covers all distances that aren't together.
Rivera Sun (Steam Drills, Treadmills and Shooting Stars - a story of our times -)
Physical vision - one might say scientific vision - brings about a metaphysical shift in the observer's view of reality as a whole. The geography of the earth, or the structure of the solar system, are in an instant utterly changed, and forever. The explorer, the scientific observer, the literary reader, experience the Sublime: a moment of revelation into the idea of the unbounded, the infinite.
Richard Holmes (The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science)
Friends are like books. You carry them with you forever, regardless of mundane impediments like geography.
Lawrence Hill (Beatrice and Croc Harry: A Novel)
If the Pentateuch is not inspired in its astronomy, geology, geography, history or philosophy, if it is not inspired concerning slavery, polygamy, war, law, religious or political liberty, or the rights of men, women and children, what is it inspired in, or about? The unity of God?—that was believed long before Moses was born. Special providence?—that has been the doctrine of ignorance in all ages. The rights of property?—theft was always a crime. The sacrifice of animals?—that was a custom thousands of years before a Jew existed. The sacredness of life?—there have always been laws against murder. The wickedness of perjury?—truthfulness has always been a virtue. The beauty of chastity?—the Pentateuch does not teach it. Thou shalt worship no other God?—that has been the burden of all religions.
Robert G. Ingersoll (Some Mistakes of Moses)
More than anyone else, the omnipresent Hamilton galvanized, inspired, and scandalized the newborn nation, serving as a flash point for pent-up conflicts of class, geography, race, religion, and ideology. His contemporaries often seemed defined by how they reacted to the political gauntlets that he threw down repeatedly with such defiant panache.
Ron Chernow (Alexander Hamilton)
It’s no easier being an artist in modern Florence than it is a philosopher in modern Athens. The past can educate and inspire. It can also imprison. A
Eric Weiner (The Geography of Genius: A Search for the World's Most Creative Places from Ancient Athens to Silicon Valley)
We all may be living in different countries, geographical areas, and time zones but one thing which unites us all is that we all belong to one race which is humanity!
Avijeet Das
Hanya ketidakbahagiaan yang memiliki makna. Itulah sebab mengapa kita merasa terpaksa membicarakannya dan punya banyak kata untuk melukiskannya. Kebahagiaan tidak membutuhkan kata- kata.
Eric Weiner (The Geography of Bliss: One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World)
In a fascinating study, psychologist David McClelland found a direct link between Greek accomplishments and the prominence of “achievement themes” in the literature of the day. The greater the amount of such inspirational literature, the greater their “real-world” achievements. Conversely, when the frequency of inspirational literature diminished, so did their accomplishments. At
Eric Weiner (The Geography of Genius: A Search for the World's Most Creative Places from Ancient Athens to Silicon Valley)
Boredom, a certain kind of boredom, is really impatience. You don't like the way things are, they aren't interesting enough for you, so you decide- and boredom is a decision that you are bored.
Eric Weiner (The Geography of Bliss: One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World)
Reality, at first glance, is a simple thing: the television speaking to you now is real. Your body sunk into that chair in the approach to midnight, a clock ticking at the threshold of awareness. All the endless detail of a solid and material world surrounding you. These things exist. They can be measured with a yardstick, a voltammeter, a weighing scale. These things are real. Then there’s the mind, half-focused on the TV, the settee, the clock. This ghostly knot of memory, idea and feeling that we call ourself also exists, though not within the measurable world our science may describe. Consciousness is unquantifiable, a ghost in the machine, barely considered real at all, though in a sense this flickering mosaic of awareness is the only true reality that we can ever know. The Here-and-Now demands attention, is more present to us. We dismiss the inner world of our ideas as less important, although most of our immediate physical reality originated only in the mind. The TV, sofa, clock and room, the whole civilisation that contains them once were nothing save ideas. Material existence is entirely founded on a phantom realm of mind, whose nature and geography are unexplored. Before the Age of Reason was announced, humanity had polished strategies for interacting with the world of the imaginary and invisible: complicated magic-systems; sprawling pantheons of gods and spirits, images and names with which we labelled powerful inner forces so that we might better understand them. Intellect, Emotion and Unconscious Thought were made divinities or demons so that we, like Faust, might better know them; deal with them; become them. Ancient cultures did not worship idols. Their god-statues represented ideal states which, when meditated constantly upon, one might aspire to. Science proves there never was a mermaid, blue-skinned Krishna or a virgin birth in physical reality. Yet thought is real, and the domain of thought is the one place where gods inarguably ezdst, wielding tremendous power. If Aphrodite were a myth and Love only a concept, then would that negate the crimes and kindnesses and songs done in Love’s name? If Christ were only ever fiction, a divine Idea, would this invalidate the social change inspired by that idea, make holy wars less terrible, or human betterment less real, less sacred? The world of ideas is in certain senses deeper, truer than reality; this solid television less significant than the Idea of television. Ideas, unlike solid structures, do not perish. They remain immortal, immaterial and everywhere, like all Divine things. Ideas are a golden, savage landscape that we wander unaware, without a map. Be careful: in the last analysis, reality may be exactly what we think it is.
Alan Moore
Transcendentalists assert that the human mind is the same—and just as open to inspiration—across all boundaries of geography, culture, race, and religion. They celebrate the expansive, daring explorations of the Eastern mind, and find much wisdom in Hinduism and Buddhism.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (Everyday Emerson: The Wisdom of Ralph Waldo Emerson Paraphrased)
... but every activity we pursue comes with an opportunity cost, as the economists remind us. Time spent commuting to work is time not spent with your kids. Time spent debating the relative merits of kale versus arugula is time not spent discussing the nature of beauty and truth. I look down at my plate of bland grub with newfound respect.
Eric Weiner (The Geography of Genius: A Search for the World's Most Creative Places from Ancient Athens to Silicon Valley)
What about this, then?” The metal surface rippled at his touch, stretching and splitting into a million thin wires that made it look like a giant version of one of those pin art toys Sophie used to play with as a kid. He tapped his fingers in a quick rhythm, and the pins shifted and sank, forming highs and lows and smooth, flat stretches. Sophie couldn’t figure out what she was seeing until he tapped a few additional beats and tiny pricks of light flared at the ends of each wire, bathing the scene in vibrant colors and marking everything with glowing labels. “It’s a map,” she murmured, making a slow circle around the table. And not just any map. A 3-D map of the Lost Cities. She’d never seen her world like that before, with everything spread out across the planet in relation to everything else. Eternalia, the elvin capital that had likely inspired the human myths of Shangri-la, was much closer to the Sanctuary than she’d realized, nestled into one of the valleys of the Himalayas—while the special animal preserve was hidden inside the hollowed-out mountains. Atlantis was deep under the Mediterranean Sea, just like the human legends described, and it looked like Mysterium was somewhere in the Bermuda Triangle. The Gateway to Exile was in the middle of the Sahara desert—though the prison itself was buried in the center of the earth. And Lumenaria… “Wait. Is Lumenaria one of the Channel Islands?” she asked, trying to compare what she was seeing against the maps she’d memorized in her human geography classes. “Yes and no. It’s technically part of the same archipelago. But we’ve kept that particular island hidden, so humans have no idea it exists—well, beyond the convoluted stories we’ve occasionally leaked to cause confusion.
Shannon Messenger (Legacy (Keeper of the Lost Cities, #8))
Travel is the epitome of expansion, connection, and discovery – both of the world and one-self. It's a profound experience that transcends geography, opening our hearts to the mesmerising tapestry of our world. Travel invites us to shatter the confines of our daily routines and perspectives, guiding us to embrace fresh outlooks, alternative lifestyles, and mind-boggling traditions.
Anastasia Pash (Travel With Style: Master the Art of Stylish and Functional Travel Capsules)
Indeed, Chicago seems to have literally sucked the air out of Springfield: another case of American becoming a network of massive city-states more intimately interconnected with other continents than with their own hinterlands. It is in the merging with the rest of the world and global civilization that the forces of division come to the fore at home. Springfield: another small city that should inspire but doesn't.
Robert D. Kaplan (Earning the Rockies: How Geography Shapes America's Role in the World)
I believe a writer is...the scribe-griot of his/her nation. S/he has the power to incite, ignite, excite, pacify, edify, motivate and eliminate others with the slash of a pen, click of a mouse or swipe of a finger. Though coloured by time, class, age, geography, childhood and other factors, a writer crystallises a slice of his/her society's culture, mores and its dark and light truths. A writer makes everything real.
Sandra Sealy
Much of the geographical work of the past hundred years... has either explicitly or implicitly taken its inspiration from biology, and in particular Darwin. Many of the original Darwinians, such as Hooker, Wallace, Huxley, Bates, and Darwin himself, were actively concerned with geographical exploration, and it was largely facts of geographical distribution in a spatial setting which provided Darwin with the germ of his theory.
David R. Stoddart
MARK TWAIN Some months after invading Iraq, President George W. Bush said he had taken the war to liberate the Philippines as his model. Both wars were inspired from heaven. Bush disclosed that God had ordered him to act as he did. And a century beforehand, President William McKinley also heard the voice from the Great Beyond: “God told me that we could not leave the Filipinos to themselves. They were unfit for self-government. There was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate them, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them.” Thus the Philippines were liberated from the Filipino threat, and along the way the United States also saved Cuba, Puerto Rico, Honduras, Colombia, Panama, Dominican Republic, Hawaii, Guam, Samoa . . . At the time, writer Ambrose Bierce revealed: “War is God’s way of teaching us geography.” And his colleague Mark Twain, leader of the Anti-Imperialist League, designed a new flag for the nation, featuring little skulls in place of stars. General Frederick Funston suggested Twain ought to be hanged for treason. Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn defended their father.
Eduardo Galeano (Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone)
Once I leave — once I start the car or catch the bus to the airport, by which the voyage is initiated — my brain starts to relax at the absence of my things, and thus the familiar thoughts that they inspire. And it is not just about the books and trinkets on my desk, because a real trip usually means leaving behind innumerable other forms of familiarity: the faces and the voices that we know well, and which cause their own cataracts of memories and associations through their long histories with us. There are the sounds we always hear, and the recognition of what caused them, like the scraping of the gate at the construction site across the square from my apartment, which arrives every morning at 7 a.m. There are the quotidian streets of daily life, lined with memories of events at each address. The shops and offices we visit most often; the foods we buy, with their familiar tastes as we eat them. But as we go away from these things, our own thoughts change, or grow into the space previously occupied by the familiar. The light itself becomes different once we start to travel, as we change setting, latitude, or geography. And with these changes, with the disappearance of the familiar and its many calls upon our thoughts, we finally begin to think differently, or even just begin to think at all.
Evan Rail (Why We Fly: The Meaning of Travel in a Hyperconnected Age (Kindle Single))
What a joy this book is! I love recipe books, but it’s short-lived; I enjoy the pictures for several minutes, read a few pages, and then my eyes glaze over. They are basically books to be used in the kitchen for one recipe at a time. This book, however, is in a different class altogether and designed to be read in its entirety. It’s in its own sui generis category; it has recipes at the end of most of the twenty-one chapters, but it’s a book to be read from cover to cover, yet it could easily be read chapter by chapter, in any order, as they are all self-contained. Every bite-sized chapter is a flowing narrative from a well-stocked brain encompassing Balinese culture, geography and history, while not losing its main focus: food. As you would expect from a scholar with a PhD in history from Columbia University, the subject matter has been meticulously researched, not from books and articles and other people’s work, but from actually being on the ground and in the markets and in the kitchens of Balinese families, where the Balinese themselves learn their culinary skills, hands on, passed down orally, manually and practically from generation to generation. Vivienne Kruger has lived in Bali long enough to get it right. That’s no mean feat, as the subject has not been fully studied before. Yes, there are so-called Balinese recipe books, most, if I’m not mistaken, written by foreigners, and heavily adapted. The dishes have not, until now, been systematically placed in their proper cultural context, which is extremely important for the Balinese, nor has there been any examination of the numerous varieties of each type of recipe, nor have they been given their true Balinese names. This groundbreaking book is a pleasure to read, not just for its fascinating content, which I learnt a lot from, but for the exuberance, enthusiasm and originality of the language. There’s not a dull sentence in the book. You just can’t wait to read the next phrase. There are eye-opening and jaw-dropping passages for the general reader as Kruger describes delicacies from the village of Tengkudak in Tabanan district — grasshoppers, dragonflies, eels and live baby bees — and explains how they are caught and cooked. She does not shy away from controversial subjects, such as eating dog and turtle. Parts of it are not for the faint-hearted, but other parts make you want to go out and join the participants, such as the Nusa Lembongan fishermen, who sail their outriggers at 5.30 a.m. The author quotes Miguel Covarrubias, the great Mexican observer of the 1930s, who wrote “The Island of Bali.” It has inspired all writers since, including myself and my co-author, Ni Wayan Murni, in our book “Secrets of Bali, Fresh Light on the Morning of the World.” There is, however, no bibliography, which I found strange at first. I can only imagine it’s a reflection of how original the subject matter is; there simply are no other sources. Throughout the book Kruger mentions Balinese and Indonesian words and sometimes discusses their derivations. It’s a Herculean task. I was intrigued to read that “satay” comes from the Tamil word for flesh ( sathai ) and that South Indians brought satay to Southeast Asia before Indonesia developed its own tradition. The book is full of interesting tidbits like this. The book contains 47 recipes in all, 11 of which came from Murni’s own restaurant, Murni’s Warung, in Ubud. Mr Dolphin of Warung Dolphin in Lovina also contributed a number of recipes. Kruger adds an introduction to each recipe, with a detailed and usually very personal commentary. I think my favorite, though, is from a village priest (pemangku), I Made Arnila of the Ganesha (Siwa) Temple in Lovina. water. I am sure most will enjoy this book enormously; I certainly did.” Review published in The Jakarta Globe, April 17, 2014. Jonathan Copeland is an author and photographer based in Bali. thejakartaglobe/features/spiritual-journey-culinary-world-bali
Vivienne Kruger
Kita akan mulai melupakan sebuah tempat begitu tempat itu kita tinggalkan. Charles Dicken
Eric Weiner (The Geography of Bliss: One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World)
Kebahagiaan tidak dihasilkan oleh potongan besar keberuntungan yang terjadi, melainkan oleh keberuntungan kecil yang terjadi setiap hari.” Benjamin Franklin
Eric Weiner (The Geography of Bliss: One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World)
On one of his trips with Jill they visited Montaigne’s tower, “twenty miles outside Bordeaux,” said Michael, who liked to pinpoint the author’s biographical geography. We also went about to several of the other places where he had been and so I read every Montaigne essay in a year or two either at the place he’d written about or in the vicinity. I have it marked. It changed my life. Mostly I was reading it with Jill. It’s got the whole humanist case of how you should look at the world. Jill and I were absolutely captivated by it. I started collecting Montaigne’s other translations. I’ve got a Florio ... which Shakespeare read. Not my particular copy, you know, but the same edition ... Hazlitt himself wrote about Montaigne. His own essays ... were obviously inspired by ... Swift also translated Montaigne. The only genealogy that meant anything to Michael was a literary one and that is why his father was the only family member admitted to this pantheon.
Carl Rollyson (A Private Life of Michael Foot)
These women's stories are based on the amazing truths real women have shared with me. Pragmatic, moral and fierce in turn - cultures, backgrounds and geographies may differ. What connects though, is the way they lead their communities into shaping their own destinies. It illustrates what I truly believe; that collectively, we can make change happen.
Madeleine F. White
Columbus’s fateful voyage was inspired by his study of a map by Paolo Toscanelli. But there was also the 1854 cholera outbreak in London, which killed hundreds of people until a physician, John Snow, drew a map demonstrating that a single contaminated water pump was the source of the illness, thereby founding the science of epidemiology. There was the 1944 invasion at Normandy, which succeeded only because of the unheralded contribution of mapmakers who had stolen across the English Channel by night for months before D-Day and mapped the French beaches.* Even the moon landing was a product of mapping. In 1961, the United States Geological Survey founded a Branch of Astrogeology, which spent a decade painstakingly assembling moon maps to plan the Apollo missions. The Apollo 11 crew pored over pouches of those maps as their capsule approached the lunar surface, much as Columbus did during his voyage. It seems that the greatest achievements in human history have all been made possible by the science of cartography.
Ken Jennings (Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks)
Maybe happiness is this: not feeling like you should be elsewhere, doing something else, being someone else...
Eric Weiner (The Geography of Bliss: One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World)
History was second on my list of favorite subjects when I was studying at the Academy in Oxenfurt.” “What was first?” “Geography,” said the poet seriously. “The atlas was bigger and it was easier to hide a demijohn of vodka behind it.” Geralt laughed dryly and got up, removed Lunin and Tyrss’s Arcane Mysteries of Magic and Alchemy from the shelf and pulled a round-bellied vessel wrapped in straw from behind the bulky volume and into the light of day. “Oho.” The bard visibly cheered up. “Wisdom and inspiration, I see, are still to be found in libraries. Oooh! I like this! Plum, isn’t it? Yes, this is true alchemy. This is a philosopher’s stone and worth studying. Your health, brother. Ooooh, it’s strong as the plague!
Andrzej Sapkowski (The Last Wish (The Witcher, #0.5))
The idea for this book came to me in 1985 in Venice as I watched that city interact with sea, sky, and wind.
Gray Brechin (Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin (California Studies in Critical Human Geography, 3))
estrogen tells the liver habitually to favor the production of HDL over that of low-density lipoprotein. (Intense exercise can have a similarly promotional effect on the liver’s outlay of HDL; the rigors of chronic activity inspire the same anabolic spirit that reproduction does, the same need to scavenge available blood lipids for the sake of creating new cells.)
Natalie Angier (Woman: An Intimate Geography)
Your personal geography is a wellspring of memoir and poetry, and a source of authentic detail for fiction.
Keiko O'Leary (Your Writing Matters: 34 Quick Essays to Get Unstuck and Stay Inspired)
This book is a compilation of interesting ideas that have strongly influenced my thoughts and I want to share them in a compressed form. That ideas can change your worldview and bring inspiration and the excitement of discovering something new. The emphasis is not on the technology because it is constantly changing. It is much more difficult to change the accompanying circumstances that affect the way technological solutions are realized. The chef did not invent salt, pepper and other spices. He just chooses good ingredients and uses them skilfully, so others can enjoy his art. If I’ve been successful, the book creates a new perspective for which the selection of ingredients is important, as well as the way they are smoothly and efficiently arranged together. In the first part of the book, we follow the natural flow needed to create the stimulating environment necessary for the survival of a modern company. It begins with challenges that corporations are facing, changes they are, more or less successfully, trying to make, and the culture they are trying to establish. After that, we discuss how to be creative, as well as what to look for in the innovation process. The book continues with a chapter that talks about importance of inclusion and purpose. This idea of inclusion – across ages, genders, geographies, cultures, sexual orientation, and all the other areas in which new ways of thinking can manifest – is essential for solving new problems as well as integral in finding new solutions to old problems. Purpose motivates people for reaching their full potential. This is The second and third parts of the book describes the areas that are important to support what is expressed in the first part. A flexible organization is based on IT alignment with business strategy. As a result of acceleration in the rate of innovation and technological changes, markets evolve rapidly, products’ life cycles get shorter and innovation becomes the main source of competitive advantage. Business Process Management (BPM) goes from task-based automation, to process-based automation, so automating a number of tasks in a process, and then to functional automation across multiple processes andeven moves towards automation at the business ecosystem level. Analytics brought us information and insight; AI turns that insight into superhuman knowledge and real-time action, unleashing new business models, new ways to build, dream, and experience the world, and new geniuses to advance humanity faster than ever before. Companies and industries are transforming our everyday experiences and the services we depend upon, from self-driving cars, to healthcare, to personal assistants. It is a central tenet for the disruptive changes of the 4th Industrial Revolution; a revolution that will likely challenge our ideas about what it means to be a human and just might be more transformative than any other industrial revolution we have seen yet. Another important disruptor is the blockchain - a distributed decentralized digital ledger of transactions with the promise of liberating information and making the economy more democratic. You no longer need to trust anyone but an algorithm. It brings reliability, transparency, and security to all manner of data exchanges: financial transactions, contractual and legal agreements, changes of ownership, and certifications. A quantum computer can simulate efficiently any physical process that occurs in Nature. Potential (long-term) applications include pharmaceuticals, solar power collection, efficient power transmission, catalysts for nitrogen fixation, carbon capture, etc. Perhaps we can build quantum algorithms for improving computational tasks within artificial intelligence, including sub-fields like machine learning. Perhaps a quantum deep learning network can be trained more efficiently, e.g. using a smaller training set. This is still in conceptual research domain.
Tomislav Milinović
Did you ever think that maybe we’re like that?” she asks me. I smile into the dark. How many times have I thought of myself as the ocean? “You think we’re like water?” Gemma sits up. The salty wind coming off the water snaps her hair around her shoulders. With one hand in the middle of my chest, she tries to push me into the sand. I’m strong enough to hold her off, but I don’t want to. I willingly collapse back and she crawls over me. Holding a smile on her face, she slips her legs on either side of my hips and settles her weight on me. In a voice thin as smoke, she says, “Well, maybe that’s how we start. Maybe, in the beginning, we’re nothing but a theoretical vast and empty sea with this huge open sky above us.” Her hands press down on my stomach and her fingers pull at the bottom of my shirt. She leans forward until her breasts are rubbing against me and her mouth is almost touching the skin of my neck. “Then slowly,” she continues, “over time, the currents change and we build up these continents inside our bodies.” Now her fingers walk a path from my bellybutton to my sternum. “And eventually, we have canyons and deserts and trees and beaches and all sorts of places where we can go and live.” I suck in a breath as Gemma flattens her hand on the skin just above my heart and kisses me just below my ear. Then she turns her face, fitting the crown of her head beneath my jaw and says, “Most of the time we’re safe on the land, but sometimes we get sucked out to sea. What do you think happens then?” I think about everything we’ve shared today. I think about Gemma and me. And how it feels like the geography inside of my own body is changing, how it’s been changing from the moment I met her. Maybe even before that. And I think about the continents we’re building between us. The bridges of land moving from her fingers to mine and the valleys and mountains formed by her lips on my skin and her words in my head. I use both of my hands to cup her face and pull her to my mouth. I press my lips to hers, parting her mouth and drinking in her breath. “I think you’d have to start swimming.” A minute of silence ticks by. Over the low drone of the waves on the beach, she whispers, “And what if you can’t swim very well?” I think for a minute. “Then you fly.
Autumn Doughton (This Sky)
Being on the frontier, as I've said, required doing rather than imagining: clearing land, building shelter, obtaining food supplies. Frontiers test ideologies like nothing else. There is no time for the theoretical. That, ultimately, is why America has not been friendly to communism, fascism, or other, more benign forms of utopianism. Idealized concepts have rarely taken firm root in America, and so intellectuals have had to look to Europe for inspiration. People here are too busy making money - an extension, of course, of the frontier ethos, with its emphasis on practical initiative.
Robert D. Kaplan (Earning the Rockies: How Geography Shapes America's Role in the World)
This is an older history being taught here, not the one often taught in schools and universities now, in which the story of the West is reduced to atrocity and little more. It is true that historical research is necessary to defeat jingoistic nationalism. The more history we know, the more complex the story of our past becomes and the more realistic we can be about it. But without some kind of usable past, there is no possibility of affecting geopolitics for the good. How do we know where to go if we can’t draw upon some inspiration from the past? There is too much destruction coming out of the academy, not enough inspiration. We require a proper balance.
Robert D. Kaplan (Earning the Rockies: How Geography Shapes America's Role in the World)
To find out, he hooked up a group of people—some highly creative and others less so—to EEG machines, then gave them a series of tests that measure creative thinking. The results were surprising: the more creatively inclined subjects showed lower cortical arousal while taking the test than did the noncreative subjects. The heightened concentration of cortical arousal is helpful when balancing your checkbook or evading a tiger, concluded Martindale, but not when trying to compose an opera or write a novel or come up with the Next Big Internet Thing. For that, we need to enter a state that Martindale called defocused, or diffused, attention. Someone in this state of mind is not scattered, at least not as we normally think of the word. Like Buddhists, they have mastered the art of “detached attachment.” They are both focused and unfocused at the same time. But why, Martindale wondered, are some people able to benefit from this diffused attention while others are not? Creative people are no more capable of controlling their cortical arousal levels than noncreative people. Creative achievements, he concluded, are based not on self-control “but rather on unintentional inspiration.” Unintentional inspiration? What can that mean? Martindale, who passed away in 2008, never said, but I can’t help but wonder if this phenomenon explains why creative people are often restless. By changing locations, they are unconsciously attempting to lower their levels of cortical arousal, defocus their attention.
Eric Weiner (The Geography of Genius: A Search for the World's Most Creative Places from Ancient Athens to Silicon Valley)
Civil rights activists quoted heavily from biblical texts, as did the Christian segregationists who opposed them. The Bible’s ancient refrains have given voice to the laments of millions of oppressed people and, too often, provided justification to their oppressors. Wars still rage over its disputed geographies.
Rachel Held Evans (Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking on Water, and Loving the Bible Again)
When the land bridges disappeared, so too did the families of man.
Anthony T. Hincks