“
(Media question to Beatles during first U.S. tour 1964)
"How do you find America?"
"Turn left at Greenland.
”
”
Ringo Starr
“
The only thing more unthinkable than leaving was staying; the only thing more impossible than staying was leaving. I didn't want to destroy anything or anybody. I just wanted to slip quietly out the back door, without causing any fuss or consequences, and then not stop running until I reached Greenland.
”
”
Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love)
“
I didn't want to destroy anything or anybody. I just wanted to slip quietly out the back door, without causing any fuss or consequences, and then not stop running until I reached Greenland.
”
”
Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love)
“
Let it be sufficient to say that, on this night, he was still my lighthouse and albatross in equal measure. The only thing more unthinkable than leaving was staying; the only thing more impossible than staying was leaving. I didn’t want to destroy anything or anybody. I just wanted to slip quietly out the back door, without causing any fuss or consequences, and then not stop running until I reached Greenland.
”
”
Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love)
“
Yes, I once was the toast of two continents! (...Greenland & Australia).
”
”
Dorothy Parker
“
Just as Australia, when I began visiting it in the 1960s, was more British than Britain itself, Europe’s most remote outpost of Greenland remained emotionally tied to Europe.
”
”
Jared Diamond (Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed)
“
Globalization makes it impossible for modern societies to collapse in isolation, as did Easter Island and the Greenland Norse in the past. Any society in turmoil today, no matter how remote ... can cause trouble for prosperous societies on other continents and is also subject to their influence (whether helpful or destabilizing). For the first time in history, we face the risk of a global decline. But we also are the first to enjoy the opportunity of learning quickly from developments in societies anywhere else in the world today, and from what has unfolded in societies at any time in the past. That's why I wrote this book.
”
”
Jared Diamond (Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed)
“
Many of our problems are broadly similar to those that undermined ... Norse Greenland, and that many other past societies also struggled to solve. Some of those past societies failed (like the Greenland Norse) and others succeeded ... The past offers us a rich database from which we can learn in order that we may keep on succeeding.
”
”
Jared Diamond (Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed)
“
Look again at the standard Mercator map and you see that Greenland appears to be the same size as Africa, and yet Africa is actually fourteen times the size of Greenland! You could fit the USA, Greenland, India, China, Spain, France, Germany and the UK into Africa and still have room for most of Eastern Europe. We know Africa is a massive land mass, but the maps rarely tell us how massive.
”
”
Tim Marshall (Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics)
“
My mind is like a room where the door swings free in the breeze, and many visitors come and go and stay and vanish as they will.
”
”
Jane Smiley (The Greenlanders)
“
Turn left at Greenland....
”
”
John Lennon
“
Like there's actually a need for Greenland. You can get ice at 7-Eleven.
”
”
Steve Kluger
“
On a long flight, after periods of crisis and many hours of fatigue, mind and body may become disunited until at times they seem completely different elements, as though the body were only a home with which the mind has been associated but by no means bound. Consciousness grows independent of the ordinary senses. You see without assistance from the eyes, over distances beyond the visual horizon. There are moments when existence appears independent even of the mind. The importance of physical desire and immediate surroundings is submerged in the apprehension of universal values.
For unmeasurable periods, I seem divorced from my body, as though I were an awareness spreading out through space, over the earth and into the heavens, unhampered by time or substance, free from the gravitation that binds to heavy human problems of the world. My body requires no attention. It's not hungry. It's neither warm or cold. It's resigned to being left undisturbed. Why have I troubled to bring it here? I might better have left it back at Long Island or St. Louis, while the weightless element that has lived within it flashes through the skies and views the planet. This essential consciousness needs no body for its travels. It needs no plane, no engine, no instruments, only the release from flesh which circumstances I've gone through make possible.
Then what am I – the body substance which I can see with my eyes and feel with my hands? Or am I this realization, this greater understanding which dwells within it, yet expands through the universe outside; a part of all existence, powerless but without need for power; immersed in solitude, yet in contact with all creation? There are moments when the two appear inseparable, and others when they could be cut apart by the merest flash of light.
While my hand is on the stick, my feet on the rudder, and my eyes on the compass, this consciousness, like a winged messenger, goes out to visit the waves below, testing the warmth of water, the speed of wind, the thickness of intervening clouds. It goes north to the glacial coasts of Greenland, over the horizon to the edge of dawn, ahead to Ireland, England, and the continent of Europe, away through space to the moon and stars, always returning, unwillingly, to the mortal duty of seeing that the limbs and muscles have attended their routine while it was gone.
”
”
Charles A. Lindbergh (The Spirit of St. Louis)
“
And she had gone off from her husband to live by herself with the priests, had she not? Does a man, seeing a trinket lying before him in the grass, fail to pick it up?
”
”
Jane Smiley (The Greenlanders)
“
To be sure, Wegener made mistakes. He asserted that Greenland is drifting west at about 1.6 kilometres a year, a clear nonsense. (Its more like a centimetre.)
”
”
Bill Bryson (A Really Short History of Nearly Everything (Young Adult))
“
In any case, the goal is the same: to connect.
”
”
Nicolas Billon (Fault Lines: Greenland – Iceland – Faroe Islands)
“
The Polar Intuit of northwest Greenland, the northernmost people, call February ‘seqinniaq’, “the month when the sun appears.
”
”
Fred Bruemmer
“
In Greenlandic Eskimo, “I should stop drinking” is Iminngernaveersaartunngortussaavunga
”
”
John McWhorter (The Power Of Babel: A Natural History of Language)
“
She raised her sad blue eyes to mine. "It's going to be so boring here without you. And I'm going to have to deal with Grandmother on my own! You need to e-mail, text, call, send smoke signals--whatever--and tell me everything you're doing."
I laughed. "Yes, I know. Every day. I promise.
”
”
Shannon Greenland (The Summer My Life Began)
“
Sometimes he tries to catch her, wading frantically through earth that has turned to water, or sometimes through air. Sometimes she tries to catch him. They never catch each other, no matter what.
”
”
Colin Greenland (The Sandman: Book of Dreams)
“
In Greenland there is no ownership of land. What you own is your house, your dogs, your sleds and kayaks. Everyone is fed. It is a food-sharing society in which the whole population is kept in mind--the widows, elderly, infirm, and ill are always taken care of. Jens said, "We weren't born to buy and sell, but to be out on the ice with our families.
”
”
Gretel Ehrlich (Unsolaced: Along the Way to All That Is)
“
To reach Greenland, turn left at the middle of Norway, keep so far north of Shetland that you can only see it if the visibility is very good, and far enough south of the Faroes that the sea appears half way up the mountain slopes. As for Iceland, stay so far to the south that you only see its flocks of birds and whales. So, ROUGHLY PARAPHRASED, run the navigational directions in an Icelandic manual of the Middle Ages,
”
”
Peter Heather (Empires and Barbarians: Migration, Development and the Birth of Europe)
“
It was always and ever hard to tell with women why they chose one way and not another.
”
”
Jane Smiley (The Greenlanders)
“
This is true, at the least, that no veil of beauty hides the evils from our sight.
”
”
Jane Smiley (The Greenlanders)
“
Blue-shirt (Blauserk in Inuktitat, the Inuit language), or Mykla Jokull, now known as Gunnbjorn's Peak (12,500 feet)--the great metaphorical centerpiece in William T. Vollmann's saga-like novel The Ice-Shirt--is the great glacier in Greenland used as a landmark by Erik the Red in sailing west from Snaefellsness.
”
”
Alexander Theroux (The Primary Colors: Three Essays)
“
And then he saw what he was, an old man, ready to die, pressed against the Greenland earth, as small as an ash berry on the face of a mountain, and he did the only thing that men can do when they know themselves, which was to weep and weep and weep.
”
”
Jane Smiley (The Greenlanders)
“
THE SPECIALISTS MODEL SPY:
"Sorry," David mumbles right before crushing his mouth to mine.
Oh my God, I'm sixteen, and I've never been kissed. Please let me be doing this right.
Except . . . this is it? This is about as exciting as kissing my laptop.
”
”
Shannon Greenland
“
In front of us, the ocean stretched for eternity. Around us, reggae mussy floated through the air. In our drying clothes and still-damp hair, we ate junk food and talked.
At some point we finished and went for a long walk in the sand. We picked up shells, laughed, and talked. Before I knew it, the sun was going down and we went back to the van. We lay side by side, stretched out on the blanket. When the sun dropped completely below the horizon, we let the moon illuminate us.
”
”
Shannon Greenland (The Summer My Life Began)
“
West Greenland coast had encountered a singular tribe or cult of degenerate Esquimaux whose religion, a curious form of devil-worship,
”
”
H.P. Lovecraft (The Call of Cthulhu)
“
The monks' response was to climb into their curraghs and row off toward Greenland. They were drawn across the storm-racked ocean, drawn west past the edge of the known world, by nothing more than a hunger of the spirit, a yearning of such queer intensity that it beggars the modern imagination.
”
”
Jon Krakauer (Into the Wild)
“
Some days they would talk all morning about exactly how warm Heaven might be. It could not be warm enough so that souls went naked, or could it? If souls went naked, then why all the weaving, and if there was no weaving then how did souls occupy themselves?
”
”
Jane Smiley (The Greenlanders)
“
One of the conclusions that we saw emerging from our discussion of Maya kings, Greenland Norse chieftains, and Easter Island chiefs is that, in the long run, rich people do not secure their own interests and those of their children if they rule over a collapsing society and merely buy themselves the privilege of being the last to starve or die.
”
”
Jared Diamond (Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed)
“
Cloaks are nice. You can wear a cloak and have nothing on under it at all. And you can go anywhere you want like that!
”
”
Colin Greenland (The Sandman: Book of Dreams)
“
even in difficult environments, collapses of human societies are not inevitable: it depends on how people respond.
”
”
Jared Diamond (Norse Greenland: A Controlled Experiment in Collapse—A Selection from Collapse (Penguin Tracks))
“
Margret saw that this is how it is that folk are made to desire what they know they should not have, they are made to wait for it, so that when it comes, no matter how dark and full of sin and repellent it is, they are glad enough to welcome it.
”
”
Jane Smiley (The Greenlanders)
“
This ploughman dead in battle slept out of doors
Many a frozen night, and merrily
Answered staid drinkers, good bedmen, and all bores:
"At Mrs Greenland's Hawthorn Bush," said he,
"I slept." None knew which bush. Above the town,
Beyond `The Drover', a hundred spot the down
In Wiltshire. And where now at last he sleeps
More sound in France -that, too, he secret keeps.
”
”
Edward Thomas
“
The Faroes, Iceland, and Greenland were all found by accident when ships were driven off course in bad weather; nobody just set out for a far horizon. It is also important to remember that many of these Viking voyagers were simply never seen again.
”
”
Neil Price (Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings)
“
Plotting is like sex. Plotting is about desire and satisfaction, anticipation and release. You have to arouse your reader’s desire to know what happens, to unravel the mystery, to see good triumph. You have to sustain it, keep it warm, feed it, just a little bit, not too much at a time, as your story goes on. That’s called suspense. It can bring desire to a frenzy, in which case you are in a good position to bring off a wonderful climax.
”
”
Colin Greenland
“
that there is such pleasure in enmity that after a while it cannot be left off even if one would will it. Another thing is also true, that when a quarrel is new, one’s friends hold one back, and give cool advice, but when it is long-standing, folk put off its end and goad the rivals.
”
”
Jane Smiley (The Greenlanders)
“
Some would think the leader of a people should be a model of what to strive for. But maybe God knew trying to be perfect is just not healthy, or maybe God could not find any perfect human beings. Maybe it's just not possible to be perfect.
”
”
Seth Greenland (Shining City)
“
Snow contains oxygen, which scatters light across the visible spectrum, making it appear white. Compacting squeezes out the oxygen, and the compacted ice crystals that remain absorb long light waves and reflect short waves. The shortest light waves are violet and blue. And so, the ice at the cold heart of Greenland is blue.
”
”
Mitchell Zuckoff (Frozen in Time: An Epic Story of Survival and a Modern Quest for Lost Heroes of World War II)
“
Sarason was as eager for war with Mexico (or Ethiopia or Siam or Greenland or any other country that would provide his pet young painters with a chance to portray Sarason being heroic amid curious vegetation) as Haik; not only to give malcontents something outside the country to be cross about, but also to give himself a chance to be picturesque.
”
”
Sinclair Lewis (It Can't Happen Here)
“
The ultimate reason behind that conservative outlook of the Greenlanders may have been the same as the reason to which my Icelandic friends attribute their own society’s conservatism. That is, even more than the Icelanders, the Greenlanders found themselves in a very difficult environment. While they succeeded in developing an economy that let them survive there for many generations, they found that variations on that economy were much more likely to prove disastrous than advantageous. That was good reason to be conservative.
”
”
Jared Diamond (Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed)
“
The truth is a stranger...Not always welcome by daylight.
”
”
Colin Greenland (The Space Opera Renaissance)
“
Our lives are lived with the illusion of control and then there are moments rare as wisdom when we abandon the pretense that we are masters of our fate.
”
”
Seth Greenland (I Regret Everything: A Love Story)
“
To bring him into such agonies as a man should never know, to deny him shrift, to tear his flesh shred from shred. And how will I ever be forgiven for such a lust as this?
”
”
Jane Smiley (The Greenlanders)
“
He was right; I was amazing.
”
”
Shannon Greenland
“
It was the idea also, that this same spermaceti was that quickening humor of the Greenland Whale which the first syllable of the word literally expresses.
”
”
Herman Melville (Moby Dick)
“
When you have seen the whole world, the old words said, there is always Greenland left.
”
”
Claire North (The End of the Day)
“
Greenland ice cores show the temperatures there changing by as much as 8 degrees Celsius in ten years, drastically altering rainfall patterns and growing conditions.
”
”
Bill Bryson (A Short History of Nearly Everything)
“
even a modest dilution of the ocean’s salt content—from increased melting of the Greenland ice sheet, for instance—could disrupt the cycle disastrously. The
”
”
Bill Bryson (A Short History of Nearly Everything)
“
Nearly 90 per cent of the planet’s ice is in Antarctica and most of the rest is in Greenland.
”
”
Bill Bryson (A Short History of Nearly Everything)
“
It wouldn't bother me in the least if all the dogs in the world weere placed in a large sack and taken to some distant island - Greenland springs attractively to mind - where they could romp around and sniff each other's anuses to their hearts' content and would never bother or terrorize me again. The only kind of dog I would excuse from this roundup is poodles. Poodles I would shoot.
To my mind, the only possible pet is a cow. Cows love you. They are harmless, they look nice, they don't need a box to crap in, they keep the grass down, and they are so trusting and stupid that you can't help but lose your heart to them. Where I live in Yorkshire, there's a herd of cows down the lane. You can stand by the wall at any hour of the day or night, and after a minute the cows will all waddle over and stand with you, much too stupid to know what to do next, but happy just to be with you. They will stand there all day, as far as I can tell, possibly till the end of time. They will listen to your problems and never ask a thing in return. They will be your friends forever. And when you get tired of the, you can kill them and eat them. Perfect.
”
”
Bill Bryson
“
On his last voyage he had seemed on the brink of success and had stood in the prow reciting a grand poem of his own composition to a dim blue promontory in which he recognized one of the capes of Greenland. But it is idle to deny that the general feeling was dampened somehow, when they discovered it was the Cape of Good Hope. In short, the admiral was one of those who keep the world young.
”
”
G.K. Chesterton (The Coloured Lands: A Whimsical Gathering Of Drawings, Stories, And Poems)
“
It is brutal work, though not more brutal than that which goes onto supply every dinner-table in the country (Life on a Greenland Whaler, an article published in The Strand Magazine in january 1897)
”
”
Arthur Conan Doyle
“
Some folk learned the nature of God, that He was merciful, having spared a husband or some cattle, that He was strict, having meted out hard punishment for small sins, that He was attentive, having sent signs of the hunger beforehand, that He was just, having sent the hunger in the first place, or having sent the whales and the teeming reindeer in the end. Some folk learned that He was to be found in the world-in the richness of the grass and the pearly beauty of the Heavens, and others learned that He could not be found in the world, for the world is always wanting, and God is completion.
”
”
Jane Smiley (The Greenlanders)
“
Locally, changes have been even more dramatic. Greenland ice cores show the temperatures there changing by as much as fifteen degrees in ten years, drastically altering rainfall patterns and growing conditions.
”
”
Bill Bryson (A Short History of Nearly Everything)
“
The Vikings could have been saved if they had borrowed survival strategies from the Inuit, but the only record we have of contact between the two peoples is the remark from a Viking settler that the Inuit bleed a lot when stabbed - an observation that hardly indicates a willingness to learn from their northern neighbors.
”
”
Johnjoe McFadden (Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology)
“
To grasp the movement of the sun in the Arctic is no simple task. Imagine standing precisely at the North Pole on June 21, the summer solstice. Your feet rest on a crust of snow and windblown ice. If you chip the snow away you find the sea ice, grayish white and opaque. Six or seven feet underneath is the Arctic Ocean, dark, about 29°F and about 13,000 feet deep. You are standing 440 miles from the nearest piece of land, the tiny island of Oodaaq off the coast of northern Greenland. You stand in each of the world’s twenty-four time zones and north of every point on earth. On this day the sun is making a flat 360° orbit exactly 23½° above the horizon.
”
”
Barry Lopez (Arctic Dreams)
“
This is my thought, that for every soul, something must come to pass, and for everything that does come to pass, every soul can imagine many things that might have come to pass, all of them less evil than what actually fell out. Folk must have something to think on, or they would be unable to hope for Heaven or remember Paradise.
”
”
Jane Smiley (The Greenlanders)
“
Still others reflected on how quickly the food could be snatched from a man's table, or the child from a woman's breast, or the wife from a man's bedcloset, that no strength of grasp could hold these goods in place. And others remarked to themselves how sweet these goods were, in spite of that, and saw that pleasure lost in every moment is pleasure lost forever.
”
”
Jane Smiley (The Greenlanders)
“
The Spanish silver mines, for example, once part of Hannibal’s domain, were soon producing so much more ore that the environmental pollution from its processing can still be detected in datable samples extracted from deep in the Greenland ice cap.
”
”
Mary Beard (SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome)
“
So often we miss the whole-fabric aspect of where we live, and our own consciousness embedded within it. We are not interrelated but “intrabranched”: one branch wound around another and fused into a single embrace. Our lacelike nervations have overlapping frequencies. It’s what the Greenlanders simply call sila: consciousness, weather, and the power of nature as one. If nothing else, we are what the physicist Richard Feynman called “scattering amplitudes,” wholes within unbounded totalities.
”
”
Gretel Ehrlich (Unsolaced: Along the Way to All That Is)
“
If you believe that astronauts have been to the moon and that the world is not flat, then you probably believe the satellite photos showing the Greenland ice sheet in full-on meltdown. Much of Manhattan and the Eastern Shore of Maryland may join the Atlantic Ocean in our lifetimes. Entire Pacific island nations will disappear. Hurricanes will bring untold destruction. Rising sea levels and crippling droughts will decimate crops and cause widespread famine. People will go hungry, and people will die.
”
”
Bill McKibben (The Global Warming Reader: A Century of Writing About Climate Change)
“
Rx for Fascism (Sonnet)
Gaza is not for sale,
Greenland is not for sale,
Ukraine is not for sale,
Canada is not for sale.
Planet Earth is not real estate,
to pander to your predatory psychopathy.
If you are so hard up for cash, we can all
chip in to buy you some good ol shock therapy.
When someone plays fast and loose with rights
and freedom, their place is either in the jungle
or in a mental institution, not in office.
Fascism, fundamentalism and nationalism,
these are the ultimate mental illness.
”
”
Abhijit Naskar (Neurosonnets: The Naskar Art of Neuroscience)
“
The Greenland fjords are peculiar for the spells of completely quiet weather, when there is not enough wind to blow out a match and the water is like a sheet of glass. The kayak hunter must sit in his boat without stirring a finger so as not to scare the shy seals away. Actually, he can only move his eyes, as even the slightest move otherwise might mean game lost. The sun, low in the sky, sends a glare into his eyes, and the landscape around moves into the realm of the unreal. The reflex from the mirror-like water hypnotizes him, he seems to be unable to move, and all of a sudden it is as if he were floating in a bottomless void, sinking, sinking, and sinking.... Horror-stricken, he tries to stir, to cry out, but he cannot, he is completely paralyzed, he just falls and falls.
”
”
Peter Freuchen (Book of the Eskimos)
“
Gaza is not for sale,
Greenland is not for sale,
Ukraine is not for sale,
Canada is not for sale.
Planet Earth is not real estate,
to pander to your predatory psychopathy.
If you are so hard up for cash, we can all
chip in to buy you some good ol shock therapy.
”
”
Abhijit Naskar (Neurosonnets: The Naskar Art of Neuroscience)
“
At a certain age, especially after certain hardships, you only want one thing: to be left alone! ...or better still, you'd like people to think you're dead! in a recent poll on 'what the young people think', they all thought I was dead... died in the Greenland! Not bad!
”
”
Louis-Ferdinand Céline (Castle to Castle)
“
But where th' extreme of vice, was ne'er agreed:
Ask where's the North? at York, 'tis on the Tweed;
In Scotland, at the Orcades; and there,
At Greenland, Zembla, or the Lord knows where:
No creature owns it in the first degree,
But thinks his neighbour farther gone than he!
”
”
Alexander Pope (An Essay on Man)
“
This has been a book about people trying to solve problems created by people trying to solve problems. In the course of reporting it, I spoke to engineers and genetic engineers, biologists and microbiologists, atmospheric scientists and atmospheric entrepreneurs. Without exception, they were enthusiastic about their work. But, as a rule, this enthusiasm was tempered by doubt. The electric fish barriers, the concrete crevasse, the fake cavern, the synthetic clouds- these were presented to me less in a spirit of techno-optimism than what might be called techno-fatalism. They weren't improvements on the originals; they were the best that anyone could come up with, given the circumstances...
It's in this context that interventions like assisted evolution and gene drives and digging millions of trenches to bury billions of trees have to be assessed. Geoengineering may be 'entirely crazy and quite disconcerting', but if it could slow the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, or take some of 'the pain and suffering away', or help prevent no-longer-fully-natural ecosystems from collapsing, doesn't it have to be considered?
”
”
Elizabeth Kolbert (Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future)
“
Plotting is like sex. Plotting is about desire and satisfaction, anticipation and release. You have to arouse your reader's desire to know what happens, to unravel the mystery, to see good triumph. You have to sustain it, keep it warm, feed it, just a little bit, not too much at a time, as your story goes on. That's called suspense. It can bring desire to a frenzy, in which case you are in a good position to bring off a wonderful climax.
”
”
Colin Greenland
“
Twenty years before, she had sailed west from Greenland off the edge of the known world. She was nineteen, newly wed for the second or third time and pregnant for the first. With her were her husband, Thorfinn Karlsefni, and three Viking crews in clinker-built boats. They were sailing to Vinland, a fabulous land that Leif Eiriksson, son of Greenland’s founder Eirik the Red, had washed up on a few years back, when he was caught in a summer storm, sailing west across the icy North Atlantic from Norway. It was Gudrid’s second attempt to get to Vinland. She meant to settle in this New World. At
”
”
Nancy Marie Brown (The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman)
“
I took quite an interest in polar expeditions. And I've been familiar with explorers who were still investigating polar zones, especially Greenland, with dog sleighs. What matters with dog sleighs is the guide. The guide is often a female dog, who is particularly subtle, and knows there's a crevice 25 or 30 meters ahead. Yet we can't see it under the snow. So we shall say she is violent because she warns the dog sleighs they're going to fall into the crevice, a 60 to 70 meter drop into a hole, and that will be it, death. Well, maybe I have the astuteness of a female dog leading dog sleighs, nothing more than that.
”
”
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
“
The peculiar other-world feeling of the Arctic regions - a feeling so singular, that if you have once been there the thought of it haunts you all your life - is due largely to the perpetual daylight. Night seems more orange-tinted and subdued than day, but there is no great difference. (Life on a Greenland Whaler)
”
”
Arthur Conan Doyle
“
All these adoptions of European styles make it obvious that the Greenlanders paid very close attention to European fashions and followed them in detail. The adoptions carry the unconscious message, “We are Europeans, we are Christians, God forbid that anyone could confuse us with the Inuit.” Just as Australia, when I began visiting it in the 1960s, was more British than Britain itself, Europe’s most remote outpost of Greenland remained emotionally tied to Europe. That would have been innocent if the ties had expressed themselves only in two-sided combs and in the position in which the arms were folded over a corpse. But the insistence on “We are Europeans” becomes more serious when it leads to stubbornly maintaining cows in Greenland’s climate, diverting manpower from the summer hay harvest to the Nordrseta hunt, refusing to adopt useful features of Inuit technology, and starving to death as a result. To us in our secular modern society, the predicament in which the Greenlanders found themselves is difficult to fathom. To them, however, concerned with their social survival as much as with their biological survival, it was out of the question to invest less in churches, to imitate or intermarry with the Inuit, and thereby to face an eternity in Hell just in order to survive another winter on Earth. The Greenlanders’ clinging to their European Christian image may have been a factor in their conservatism that I mentioned above: more European than Europeans themselves, and thereby culturally hampered in making the drastic lifestyle changes that could have helped them survive.
”
”
Jared Diamond (Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive)
“
I partly surmise also, that this wicked charge against whalers may be likewise imputed to the existence on the coast of Greenland, in former times, of a Dutch village called Schmerenburgh or Smeerenberg, which latter name is the one used by the learned Fogo Von Slack, in his great work on Smells, a text-book on that subject.
”
”
Herman Melville (Moby Dick)
“
About 15,000 BC, the Ice Age came to an end as the Earth’s climate warmed up. Evidence from the Greenland ice cores suggests that average temperatures rose by as much as fifteen degrees Celsius in a short span of time. This warming seems to have coincided with rapid increases in human populations as the global warming led to expanding animal populations and much greater availability of wild plants and foods. This process was put into rapid reverse at about 14,000 BC, by a period of cooling known as the Younger Dryas, but after 9600 BC, global temperatures rose again, by seven degrees Celsius in less than a decade, and have since stayed high. Archaeologist Brian Fagan calls it the Long Summer.
”
”
Daron Acemoğlu (Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty)
“
By December an elastic skin of ice reached out hundreds of miles into the sea, rolling with every wave.
”
”
Will Chancellor (A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall)
“
Then humming thrice, he assumed a most ridiculous solemnity of aspect, and entered into a learned investigation of the nature of stink...The French were pleased with the putrid effluvia of animal food; and so were the Hottentots in Africa, and the Savages in Greenland; and that the Negroes on the coast of Senegal would not touch fish till it was rotten; strong presumptions in favour of what is generally called stink, as those nations are in a state of nature, undebauched by luxury, unseduced by whim and caprice: that he had reason to believe the stercoraceous flavour, condemned by prejudice as a stink, was, in fact, most agreeable to the organs of smelling; for, that every person who pretended to nauseate the smell of another's excretions, snuffed up his own with particular complacency...
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Tobias Smollett (The Expedition of Humphry Clinker)
“
I can’t tell you what I look like. I look in the mirror and see
nothing but space. Space reflecting space, that’s what the
mirror shows. It figures because Grandmamma said I was
nothing but dirt. Dirt under her feet she’d say. Dirt she needed
to keep kicking out of the way. Grandmamma said I wasn’t
sweeping-up kind of dirt; I was the kind of dirt you needed to
kick and scrape off the bottom of your shoes.
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Jan Fink (Tales from a Strange Southern Lady)
“
Most of the water that will drown Miami and New York and Venice and other coastal cities will come from two places: Antarctica and Greenland. Often you hear about the disappearance of the snows on Mount Kilimanjaro or the glaciers in Patagonia, but in the context of drowning cities, land-based glaciers won’t contribute much. What really matters is what happens on the two big blocks of ice at either end of the Earth.
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Jeff Goodell (The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World)
“
Early naturalists talked often about “deep time”—the perception they had, contemplating the grandeur of this valley or that rock basin, of the profound slowness of nature. But the perspective changes when history accelerates. What lies in store for us is more like what aboriginal Australians, talking with Victorian anthropologists, called “dreamtime,” or “everywhen”: the semi-mythical experience of encountering, in the present moment, an out-of-time past, when ancestors, heroes, and demigods crowded an epic stage. You can find it already by watching footage of an iceberg collapsing into the sea—a feeling of history happening all at once. It is. The summer of 2017, in the Northern Hemisphere, brought unprecedented extreme weather: three major hurricanes arising in quick succession in the Atlantic; the epic “500,000-year” rainfall of Hurricane Harvey, dropping on Houston a million gallons of water for nearly every single person in the entire state of Texas; the wildfires of California, nine thousand of them burning through more than a million acres, and those in icy Greenland, ten times bigger than those in 2014; the floods of South Asia, clearing 45 million from their homes. Then the record-breaking summer of 2018 made 2017 seem positively idyllic. It brought an unheard-of global heat wave, with temperatures hitting 108 in Los Angeles, 122 in Pakistan, and 124 in Algeria. In the world’s oceans, six hurricanes and tropical storms appeared on the radars at once, including one, Typhoon Mangkhut, that hit the Philippines and then Hong Kong, killing nearly a hundred and wreaking a billion dollars in damages, and another, Hurricane Florence, which more than doubled the average annual rainfall in North Carolina, killing more than fifty and inflicting $17 billion worth of damage. There were wildfires in Sweden, all the way in the Arctic Circle, and across so much of the American West that half the continent was fighting through smoke, those fires ultimately burning close to 1.5 million acres. Parts of Yosemite National Park were closed, as were parts of Glacier National Park in Montana, where temperatures also topped 100. In 1850, the area had 150 glaciers; today, all but 26 are melted.
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David Wallace-Wells (The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming)
“
Cabin and cosmos, sun and home, and a garden full of radishes and Swiss chard. So much I hadn’t had for a long time, yet I missed Jens and the dogs and the feel of sea ice under me; I missed lions roaring and picking thorns from my feet in Africa. In both Africa and Greenland, I’d seen the two root causes of climate change: degraded and desertified earth caused by ineffectual rainfall, and the loss of albedo because of the disappearance of snow and ice.
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Gretel Ehrlich (Unsolaced: Along the Way to All That Is)
“
There is nothing that the media could say to me that would justify the way they’ve acted. You can hound me. You can follow me, but in no way should you frighten those around me. To harm my wife and potentially harm my daughter—there is no excuse that could put any of you on the right side of morality. I met Rose when I was fifteen and she was fourteen, and through what she would call fate and I’d call circumstance of our hobbies, we’d cross paths dozens of times over the course of a decade. At seventeen, I attended the same national Model UN conference as Rose, and a delegate for Greenland locked us in a janitorial closet. He also stole our phones. He had to beat us dishonorably because he couldn’t beat us any other way. Rose said being locked in a confined space with me was the worst two hours of her life" They look bemused, brows furrowing. I can’t help but smile.
“You’re confused because you don’t know whether she was exaggerating or whether she was being truthful. But the truth is that we are complex people with the ability to love to hate and to hate to love, and I wouldn’t trade her for any other person. So that day, stuck beside mops and dirtied towels, I could’ve picked the lock five minutes in and let her go. Instead, I purposefully spent two hours with a girl who wore passion like a dress made of diamonds and hair made of flames. Every day of my life, I am enamored. Every day of my life, I am bewitched. And every day of my life, I spend it with her.”
My chest swells with more power, lifting me higher.
“I’ve slept with many different kinds of people, and yes, the three that spoke to the press are among them. Rose is the only person I’ve ever loved, and through that love, we married and started a family. There is no other meaning behind this, and for you to conjure one is nothing less than a malicious attack against my marriage and my child. Anything else has no relevance. I can’t be what you need me to be. So you’ll have to accept this version or waste your time questioning something that has no answer. I know acceptance isn’t easy when you’re unsure of what you’re accepting, but all I can say is that you’re accepting me as me. I leave them with a quote from Sylvia Plath.
“‘I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart.’” My lips pull higher, into a livelier smile. “‘I am, I am, I am.’”
With this, I step away from the podium, and I exit to a cacophony of journalists shouting and asking me to clarify.
Adapt to me.
I’m satisfied, more than I even predicted.
Some people will rewind this conference on their television, to listen closely and try to understand me. I don’t need their understanding, but my daughter will—and I hope the minds of her peers are wide open with vibrant hues of passion.
I hope they all paint the world with color.
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Krista Ritchie (Fuel the Fire (Calloway Sisters #3))
“
He stretched his arm above my head, and my heart skipped a beat. “I’ve been thinking about this a lot.” “This?” David toyed with the hair on top of my head. “This.” “K-kissing?” He pressed his body against mine, and I stopped breathing. “Speaking of which.” “I haven’t brushed my teeth,” I blurted, then realized what an extremely stupid thing that was to say. His eyes crinkled. “Hmmm, did you brush them this morning?” “Yes,” I croaked. “Good.” He tilted his head. “Bu—
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Shannon Greenland (Down to the Wire (The Specialists Book 2))
“
Thus, Norse society’s structure created a conflict between the short-term interests of those in power, and the long-term interests of the society as a whole. Much of what the chiefs and clergy valued proved eventually harmful to the society. Yet the society’s values were at the root of its strengths as well as of its weaknesses. The Greenland Norse did succeed in creating a unique form of European society, and in surviving for 450 years as Europe’s most remote outpost.
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Jared Diamond (Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed)
“
Populations eating a remarkably wide range of traditional diets generally don't suffer from these chronic diseases. These diets run the gamut from ones very high in fat (the Inuit in Greenland subsist largely on seal blubber) to ones high in carbohydrate (Central American Indians subsist largely on maize and beans) to ones very high in protein (Masai tribesmen in Africa subsist chiefly on cattle blood, meat and milk), to cite three rather extreme examples. But much the same holds true for more mixed traditional diets. What this suggests is that there is no single ideal human diet but that the human omnivore is exquisitely adapted to a wide range of different foods and a variety of different diets. Except, that is, for one: the relatively new (in evolutionary terms) Western diet that that most of us now are eating. What an extraordinary achievement for a civilization: to have developed the one diet that reliably makes its people sick!
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Michael Pollan (Food Rules: An Eater's Manual)
“
Greenland, the world’s largest island, is a cold and desolate place, all but a tiny coastal strip of which is covered by an ice cap 5,000 feet thick. In winter, with temperatures down to -9°F (-23°C), the sun does not rise until ten in the morning, and sets again at two in the after-noon. Few crops grow, and only a few sheep graze the scrubland in the extreme south. Storms with winds of up to 150 mph frequently sweep the frozen wastes, and it is often so cold that a man’s breath freezes on his beard.
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Bernard Edwards (The Twilight of the U-Boats)
“
Although Greenland's Natural defenses discouraged settlement, some hardy souls insisted, Europeans returned to Greenland, led by a Danish-Norwegian missionary named Hans Egede. Hoping to discover Viking descendants, Egede instead found Inuit people, so he stayed to spread the gospel. Colonization followed though few Danes saw the point of the place. Unlike the native North Americans, the native Inuit people of Greenland never surrendered their majority status to outsiders, though they did embrace Christianity.
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Mitchell Zuckoff (Frozen in Time: An Epic Story of Survival and a Modern Quest for Lost Heroes of World War II)
“
OKU NMA, THE PRINCESS OF LIGHT
"And behold, all I see is mercy and grace" cried out the King over the Crown of the Princess of Light. As a bearer of good tidings, I turned to the King and cried out "Behold the peace of the Kingdom of Light".
Ada Di Oma, the beauty from the land of the Kings. Oh Princess of Light, the bird through which goodness is spat into the hearts of men.
The Bride to the perfect Groom. Let your reigning be heard across the Greenland.
Poem by Victor Vote for Philomena Ndu Ezechukwu
@©️2021 by VVF
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Victor Vote
“
Very few eighteenth-century slaves have shared their stories about the institution and experience of slavery. The violence required to feed the system of human bondage often made enslaved men and women want to forget their pasts, not recollect them. For fugitives, like Ona Judge, secrecy was a necessity. Enslaved men and women on the run often kept their pasts hidden, even from the people they loved the most: their spouses and children. Sometimes, the nightmare of human bondage, the murder, rape, dismemberment, and constant degradation, was simply too terrible to speak of. But it was the threat of capture and re-enslavement that kept closed the mouths of those who managed to beat the odds and successfully escape. Afraid of being returned to her owners, Judge lived a shadowy life that was isolated and clandestine. For almost fifty years, the fugitive slave woman kept to herself, building a family and a new life upon the quicksand of her legal enslavement. She lived most of her time as a fugitive in Greenland, New Hampshire, a tiny community just outside the city of Portsmouth. At
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Erica Armstrong Dunbar (Never Caught: The Washingtons' Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge)
“
Da den arvelige Synd blev forklaret for nogle, sagde de: Hvi lod GUD ikke Adam og Eva strax omkomme og skabte andre Mennesker i deres Sted, som kunde have forplantet reene Børn og Efterkommere? Videre, da dem blev sagt, at Dievelen forfører Mennesker til at overtræde GUds Bud, hvi GUd da ikke dræber eller indspærrer ham og derved befrier Menneskene fra Fristelser, som styrte dem udi evig U-lykke? Videre, naar dem siges, at de, som ikke kiende GUd og troe paa ham, blive fordømte, svare de, hvi haver da GUd tøvet saa længe med at forkynde os Troen?
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Ludvig Holberg (Epistler)
“
There exist, he says, natural, vulgar, and pathological variants of this impulse, in addition to a higher form which is the only genuinely humane type. Its vulgar manifestation lacks all moral value, and can occur even among mindless animals. The less educated one is, the less familiar one is with the qualities of other places in the world: all the stronger is the attraction to the patch of land where one first saw the light of day. In this respect, Greenlanders and Laplanders, Samoyeds and Hottentots must be listed together with the cowherd on his Swiss Alpine meadow.
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Albert Vigoleis Thelen (The Island of Second Sight)
“
How did the Vikings survive in greenless Greenland and earthless Scotland? How did they have enough provisions to push on to Woodland and Vineland, where they dared not go inland to gather food, and yet they still had enough food to get back? What did these Norsemen eat on the five expeditions to America between 985 and 1011 that have been recorded in Icelandic sagas? There were able to travel to all these distant, barren shores because they had learned to preserve codfish by hanging it in the frosty winter air until it lost four-fifths of its weight and became a durable woodlike plank.
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Mark Kurlansky (Summary & Study Guide Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World by Mark Kurlansky)
“
Slig jubel og henrykkelse har Kristiania vel aldrig før været i, som da Grønlandsfarerne kom tilbage. Sexti Tusing Mennesker modtog dem på Bryggen, femti Tusind fulgte dem til hotellet, ti Tusind raabte niti Tusind hurra, en gammel pensjoneret Oberst fra Kampen skreg sig simpelthen ihjel på Stedet.
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Knut Hamsun
“
If observing Trump’s schoolboy act in relationship to North Korea felt like watching a disaster movie, then witnessing his Greenland bid and subsequent tantrum was more like seeing a guest at a fancy dinner party blow his nose in an embroidered napkin and proceed to use a silver fork to scratch his foot under the table. But not only did most journalists cover the debacle with restraint—many also provided historical and political context. Explanations of the strategic and economic importance of the Arctic proliferated; many media outlets noted that President Harry S Truman had also wanted to buy Greenland. Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum, a consistent Trump critic, tried the opposite approach and wrote a piece explaining why the United States needs a tiny country like Denmark to be its ally. The media were doing what media should do—providing context, organizing relevant information, creating narrative—and this too had a normalizing effect, simply by helping media consumers to absorb the unabsorbable. It was as though the other dinner guests had carried on with their polite conversation and even handed the disruptive, deranged visitor a clean fork so that he wouldn’t have to eat dessert with the utensil he had stuck in his shoe.
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Masha Gessen (Surviving Autocracy)
“
On a flat surface with just the normal x and y coordinates, any high school algebra student, with the help of old Pythagoras, can calculate the distance between points. But imagine a flat map (of the world, for example) that represents locations on what is actually a curved globe. Things get stretched out near the poles, and measurement gets more complex. Calculating the actual distance between two points on the map in Greenland is different from doing so for points near the equator. Riemann worked out ways to determine mathematically the distance between points in space no matter how arbitrarily it curved and contorted.
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Walter Isaacson (Einstein: His Life and Universe)
“
This sense of instability is reinforced when we look within the last ice age at shorter-term climate fluctuations. There were repeated, incredibly rapid climate changes that were at least hemispheric in the extent of their impacts. As the last ice age ended, our record of these abrupt climate changes comes into sharper focus, revealing that warming of up to 10°C in Greenland has occurred within less than a decade. This reinforces the idea that the present climate system is unusually unstable—at least on relatively short timescales—providing an important backdrop for thinking about our own planet-changing activities as a species.
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Tim Lenton (Earth System Science: A Very Short Introduction)
“
Those people who shoot endless time-lapse films of unfurling roses and tulips have the wrong idea. They should train their cameras instead on the melting of pack ice, the green filling of ponds, the tidal swings…They should film the glaciers of Greenland, some of which creak along at such a fast clip that even the dogs bark at them. They should film the invasion of the southernmost Canadian tundra by the northernmost spruce-fir forest, which is happening right now at the rate of a mile every 10 years. When the last ice sheet receded from the North American continent, the earth rebounded 10 feet. Wouldn’t that have been a sight to see?
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Annie Dillard (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek)
“
In this trembling moment, with light armor under several flags rolling across northern Syria, with civilians beaten to death in the streets of Occupied Palestine, with fires roaring across the vineyards of California and forests being felled to ensure more space for development, with student loans from profiteers breaking the backs of the young, and with Niagaras of water falling into the oceans from every sector of Greenland, in this moment, is it still possible to face the gathering darkness and say to the physical Earth, and to all its creatures, including ourselves, fiercely and without embar-rassment, I love you, and to embrace fearlessly the burning world?
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Barry Lopez
“
Of the 3 percent of Earth's water that is fresh, most exists as ice sheets. Only the tiniest amount- 0.036 percent is found in lakes, rivers, and reservoirs, and an even smaller part- just 0.001 percent - exists in clouds or as vapor. Nearly 90 percent of the planets ice is in Antarctica, and most of the rest is in Greenland. Go to the South Pole and you will be standing on nearly two miles of ice, at the North Pole just fifteen feet of it. Antarctica alone has six million cubic miles of ice- enough to raise the oceans by a height of two hundred feet if it all melted. But if all the water in the atmosphere fell as rain, evenly everywhere, the oceans would deepen by only an inch. p273
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Bill Bryson (A Short History of Nearly Everything)
“
For example, he looks at 21 different hunter-gatherer societies for which we have solid historical evidence, from the Walbiri of Australia to the Tauade of New Guinea to the Ammassalik of Greenland to the Ona of Tierra Del Fuego and found that the average number of people in their villages was 148.4. The same pattern holds true for military organization. "Over the years military planners have arrived at a rule of thumb which dictates that functional fighting units cannot be substantially larger than 200 men." Dunbar writes. "This, I suspect, is not simply a matter of how the generals in the rear exercise control and coordination, because companies have remained obdurately stuck at this size despite all the advances in communications technology since the first world war. Rather, it is as thought the planners have discovered, by trial and error over the centuries, that it is hard to get more than this number of men sufficiently familiar with each other so that they can work together as a functional unit." It is still possible, ofcourse, to run an army with larger groups. But at a bigger size you have to impose complicated hierarchies and rules and regulations and formal measures to try to command loyalty and cohesion. But below 150, Dunbar argues, it is possible to achieve these same goals informally: "At this size, orders can be implemented and unruly behavior controlled on the basis of personal loyalties and direct man-to-man contacts. With larger groups this becomes impossible.
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Malcolm Gladwell (The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference)
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This ability to zoom in at very high resolution on a time window just 21 years wide and almost 13,000 years in the past comes to us courtesy of an amazing scientific resource consisting of ice cores from Greenland. Extracted with tubular drills that can reach depths of more than 3 kilometers, these cores preserve an unbroken 100,000-year record of any environmental and climatic events anywhere around the globe that affected the Greenland ice cap. What they show, and what Allen is referring to, is a mysterious spike in the metallic element platinum--'a 21-year interval with elevated platinum,' as he puts it now--'so we know that was the length of the impact event because there's very little way, once platinum falls on the ice sheet, that it can move around. It's pretty well locked in place.
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Graham Hancock (America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization)
“
So it was with Vigdis’ neighbors. Folk recalled how fat she was, how proud, though only the daughter of a cowman, and how niggardly. Serving boys had been beaten for taking a bit of honey, and neighbors had been summoned before the Thing on suspicion of hay stealing or sheep stealing, when anyone could see that the hay had only been used up, and the sheep had only been lost in the hills above the steading.
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Jane Smiley (The Greenlanders)
“
You said write something “fun” we did over summer to get our “grammer mussels flexing” again, so ok, Mrs Tweedy, this summer scientists announced that in the last 40 yrs humans have killed 60 percent of the wild mammals and fishes and birds on earth. Is that fun? Also in the past 30 yrs, we melted 95 percent of the oldest thickest ice in the arctic. When we have melted all the ice in Greenland, just the ice in Greenland, not the north pole, not Alaska, just Greenland, Mrs Tweedy, know what happens? The oceans rise 23 feet. That drowns Miami, New York, London, and Shanghai, that’s like hop on the boat with your grandkids, Mrs Tweedy, and you’re like, do you want some snacks, and they’re like, Grandma, look underwater, there’s the statute of liberty, there’s Big Ben, there’s the dead people. Is that fun, are my grammer mussels flexing?
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Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
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There is one way to understand another culture. Living it. Move into it, ask to be tolerated as a guest, learn the language. At some point understanding may come. It will always be wordless. The moment you grasp what is foreign, you will lose the urge to explain it. To explain a phenomenon is to distance yourself from it. When I start talking about Qaanaaq, to myself or to others, I again start to lose what has never been truly mine.
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Peter Høeg
“
Miss Boyd’s voyages to Greenland were conducted during a transitional period in polar exploration between “the Golden Age,” in which conquering the poles was accomplished by overland routes and by sea, and the modern technological era heralded by early polar flights by Amundsen, Ellsworth, and Byrd. Gillis wrote that Louise Arner Boyd “represented one of the last revivals of a Victorian phenomenon the wealthy explorer who poured a personal fortune into expeditions aimed at advancing science and satisfying profound personal curiosity.” [3] In rejecting a sedate and sheltered life as a wealthy wife and mother, she defied societal expectations. But she also challenged the ideal of a polar explorer as defined by manliness, stoicism, and heroism. Her seven daring expeditions to northern Norway and Greenland between 1926 and 1955 paved the way for later female polar explorers,
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Joanna Kafarowski (The Polar Adventures of a Rich American Dame: A Life of Louise Arner Boyd)
“
If this isn't a guidebook, what is it? A book of sermons, perhaps.
I preach that air travel be scaled back, as a start, to the level of twenty years ago, further reductions to be considered after all the Boeing engineers have been retrained as turkey ranchers.
The state Game Department should establish a season on helicopters — fifty-two weeks a year, twenty-four hours a day, no bag limit.
Passenger trains must be restored, as a start, to the service of forty years ago and then improved from there.
The Gypsy Bus System must not be regularized (the government would regulate it to death) but publicized cautiously through the underground.
I would discourage, if not ban, trekking to Everest base camp and flying over the Greenland Icecap. Generally, people should stay home. Forget gaining a little knowledge about a lot and strive to learn about a little.
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Harvey Manning (Walking the Beach to Bellingham (Northwest Reprints))
“
You’ll notice here in Greenland that the women are very strong, not only physically strong, but in all respects: in politics, business, education level and everything,” she says, adding that roughly half the island’s parliament is female. “Our bishop is a woman, most mayors are women and so forth. There’s never been a fight for gender equality in Greenland. Women have always been powerful in our society. Our God was female, and when the Christians came to Greenland [in the eighteenth century] and said ‘our God is mighty and great and he looks like us,’ our first reaction was: a He? Because not only are our women smarter and more pretty than men, they also give birth, they give life, and when there are problems in society, the women are the ones who are fighting to be sure the society survives. The Inuit language has no difference between he or she, or between mankind and animal,” she adds. “They’re all equal.
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Colin Woodard (American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America)
“
Professor Napier and his colleague Victor Clube, formerly dean of the Astrophysics Department at Oxford University, go so far as to describe the 'unique complex of debris' within the Taurid stream as 'the greatest collision hazard facing the earth at the present time.' Coordination of their findings with those of Allen West, Jim Kennett, and Richard Firestone, as led both teams--the geophysicists and the astronomers--to conclude that it was very likely objects from the then much younger Taurid meteor stream that hit the earth around 12,800 years ago and caused the onset of the Younger Dryas. These objects, orders of magnitude larger than the one that exploded over Tunguska, contained extraterrestrial platinum, and what the evidence from the Greenland ice cores seems to indicate is an epoch of 21 years in which the earth was hit every year, with the bombardments increasing annually in intensity until the fourteenth year, when they peaked and then began to decline before ceasing in the twenty-first year.
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Graham Hancock (America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization)
“
Climate change doesn’t always take on such dramatic forms. More often, it’s insidious. Bugs can survive in places they couldn’t before, greatly increasing the threat of tropical diseases, even as far north as Alaska and Greenland. In search of cooler weather, trees, birds, mammals, and other species are creeping up mountain slopes and toward the poles. Spring green-up occurs earlier every year, shifting the timing of thousands of species’ interactions and rapidly shifting growing zones, which throw entire ecosystems dangerously off-balance. Heat waves have become prolonged and deadlier. Wildfire smoke is aggravating chronic illnesses hundreds of miles away from the flames. Air pollution, worsened by fossil fuel burning, kills more than nineteen thousand people a day, making it one of the leading causes of death in nearly every country on Earth. Young people growing up today are seeking treatment for mental health issues in numbers never seen before, in part because they are not always sure they’ll have a livable future.
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Eric Holthaus (The Future Earth: A Radical Vision for What's Possible in the Age of Warming)
“
In 2014, we learned that the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets were even more vulnerable to melting than scientists anticipated—in fact, the West Antarctic sheet had already passed a tipping point of collapse, more than doubling its rate of ice loss in just five years. The same had happened in Greenland, where the ice sheet is now losing almost a billion tons of ice every single day. The two sheets contain enough ice to raise global sea levels ten to twenty feet—each. In 2017, it was revealed that two glaciers in the East Antarctic sheet were also losing ice at an alarming rate—eighteen billion tons of ice each year, enough to cover New Jersey in three feet of ice. If both glaciers go, scientists expect, ultimately, an additional 16 feet of water. In total, the two Antarctic ice sheets could raise sea level by 200 feet; in many parts of the world, the shoreline would move by many miles. The last time the earth was four degrees warmer, as Peter Brannen has written, there was no ice at either pole and sea level was 260 feet higher. There were palm trees in the Arctic. Better not to think what that means for life at the equator.
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David Wallace-Wells (The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming)
“
It’s not a serious project,” Laurence said as they crossed Castro Street. “Milton doesn’t think the human race will still be here in a hundred years, much less a few thousand. This is just his way of hedging his bets. Or assuaging his conscience.” “It’s gotten me three free trips to Greenland,” Isobel said. “Honestly, I think Milton’s opinions depend on how many interns he’s killed today.” She half-winked, to indicate this was a joke and Milton killed no interns. During the dinner, Isobel talked more about her career transition, from rockets to Milton’s Ten Percent Project. “I used to dream about rockets.” Isobel scooped a corn chip into the communal pico de gallo. “Every single night, for months and months. After we pulled the plug on Nimble Aerospace. I had these weird dreams that there was a rocket launch going up any minute, and we’d misplaced the final telemetry. Or we were sending up a rocket, and it looked beautiful and proud shooting up into the air, and then it collided with a jumbo jet. Or worst of all was the dreams where nothing went wrong, rockets just soared for hours, and I sat on the ground watching with tears in my eyes.
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Charlie Jane Anders (All the Birds in the Sky)
“
Tracing the career of the Teuton through mediaeval and modern history, we can find no possible excuse for denying his actual biological supremacy. In widely separated localities and under widely diverse conditions, his innate racial qualities have raised him to preeminence. There is no branch of modern civilization that is not of his making. As the power of the Roman empire declined, the Teuton sent down into Italy, Gaul, and Spain the re-vivifying elements which saved those countries from complete destruction. Though now largely lost in the mixed population, the Teutons are the true founders of all the so-called Latin states. Political and social vitality had fled from the old inhabitants; the Teuton only was creative and constructive. After the native elements absorbed the Teutonic invaders, the Latin civilizations declined tremendously, so that the France, Italy, and Spain of today bear every mark of national degeneracy.
In the lands whose population is mainly Teutonic, we behold a striking proof of the qualities of the race. England and Germany are the supreme empires of the world, whilst the virile virtues of the Belgians have lately been demonstrated in a manner which will live forever in song and story. Switzerland and Holland are veritable synonyms for Liberty. The Scandinavians are immortalized by the exploits of the Vikings and Normans, whose conquests over man and Nature extended from the sun-baked shores of Sicily to the glacial wastes of Greenland, even attaining our own distant Vinland across the sea. United States history is one long panegyric of the Teuton, and will continue to be such if degenerate immigration can be checked in time to preserve the primitive character of the population.
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H.P. Lovecraft
“
Because the number system is like human life. (emphasis added) First you have natural numbers. The ones that are whole and positive. The numbers of a small child. But human consciousness expands. The child discovers a sense of long, and do you know what the mathematical expression is for longing?’
He adds cream and several drops of orange juice to the soup.
‘The negative numbers. The formalization of the feeling that you are missing something. And human consciousness expands and grows even more, and the child discovers the in between spaces. Between stones, between pieces of moss on the stones, between people. And between numbers. And do you know what that leads to? It leads to fractions. Whole numbers plus fractions prouce rational numbers. And human consciousness doesn’t stop there. It wants to go beyond reason. It adds an operation as absurd as the extraction of roots. And produces irrational numbers.’
He warms French bread in the over and fills the pepper mill.
‘It’s a form of madness. Because the irrational numbers are infinite. They can’t be written down. They force human consciousness out beyond the limits. And by adding irrational numbers to rational numbers, you get real numbers.’
I’ve stepped into the middle of the room to have more space. It’s rare that you have a chance to explain yourself to a fellow human being. Usually you have to fight for the floor. And this is important to me.
‘It doesn’t stop. It never stops. Because now, on the spot, we expand the real numbers with imaginary square roots of negative numbers. These are numbers we can’t picture, numbers that normal human consciousness cannot comprehend. And when we add the imaginary numbers to the real numbers, we have the complex number system. The first number system in which it’s possible to explain satisfactorily the crystal formation of ice. It’s like a vast, open landscape. The horizons. You head toward them, and they keep receding. That is Greenland, and that’s what I can’t be without! That’s why I don’t want to be locked up
”
”
Peter Høeg (Smilla's Sense of Snow)
“
What a lovely day again; were it a new-made world, and made for a summer-house to the angels, and this morning the first of its throwing open to them, a fairer day could not dawn upon that world. Here's food for thought, had Ahab time to think; but Ahab never thinks; he only feels, feels, feels; that's tingling enough for mortal man! to think's audacity. God only has that right and privilege. Thinking is, or ought to be, a coolness and a calmness; and our poor hearts throb, and our poor brains beat too much for that. And yet, I've sometimes thought my brain was very calm—frozen calm, this old skull cracks so, like a glass in which the contents turned to ice, and shiver it. And still this hair is growing now; this moment growing, and heat must breed it; but no, it's like that sort of common grass that will grow anywhere, between the earthy clefts of Greenland ice or in Vesuvius lava. How the wild winds blow it; they whip it about me as the torn shreds of split sails lash the tossed ship they cling to. A vile wind that has no doubt blown ere this through prison corridors and cells, and wards of hospitals, and ventilated them, and now comes blowing hither as innocent as fleeces. Out upon it!—it's tainted. Were I the wind, I'd blow no more on such a wicked, miserable world. I'd crawl somewhere to a cave, and slink there. And yet, 'tis a noble and heroic thing, the wind! who ever conquered it? In every fight it has the last and bitterest blow. Run tilting at it, and you but run through it. Ha! a coward wind that strikes stark naked men, but will not stand to receive a single blow. Even Ahab is a braver thing—a nobler thing that that. Would now the wind but had a body; but all the things that most exasperate and outrage mortal man, all these things are bodiless, but only bodiless as objects, not as agents. There's a most special, a most cunning, oh, a most malicious difference! And yet, I say again, and swear it now, that there's something all glorious and gracious in the wind. These warm Trade Winds, at least, that in the clear heavens blow straight on, in strong and steadfast, vigorous mildness; and veer not from their mark, however the baser currents of the sea may turn and tack, and mightiest Mississippies of the land swift and swerve about, uncertain where to go at last. And by the eternal Poles! these same Trades that so directly blow my good ship on; these Trades, or something like them—something so unchangeable, and full as strong, blow my keeled soul along!
”
”
Herman Melville (Moby-Dick or, The Whale)
“
And, even more important for our purposes, these facts are sturdy enough that we can build a sensible diet upon them. Here they are: FACT 1. Populations that eat a so-called Western diet—generally defined as a diet consisting of lots of processed foods and meat, lots of added fat and sugar, lots of refined grains, lots of everything except vegetables, fruits, and whole grains—invariably suffer from high rates of the so-called Western diseases: obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and cancer. Virtually all of the obesity and type 2 diabetes, 80 percent of the cardiovascular disease, and more than a third of all cancers can be linked to this diet. Four of the top ten killers in America are chronic diseases linked to this diet. The arguments in nutritional science are not about this well-established link; rather, they are all about identifying the culprit nutrient in the Western diet that might be responsible for chronic diseases. Is it the saturated fat or the refined carbohydrates or the lack of fiber or the transfats or omega-6 fatty acids—or what? The point is that, as eaters (if not as scientists), we know all we need to know to act: This diet, for whatever reason, is the problem. FACT 2. Populations eating a remarkably wide range of traditional diets generally don’t suffer from these chronic diseases. These diets run the gamut from ones very high in fat (the Inuit in Greenland subsist largely on seal blubber) to ones high in carbohydrate (Central American Indians subsist largely on maize and beans) to ones very high in protein (Masai tribesmen in Africa subsist chiefly on cattle blood, meat, and milk), to cite three rather extreme examples. But much the same holds true for more mixed traditional diets. What this suggests is that there is no single ideal human diet but that the human omnivore is exquisitely adapted to a wide range of different foods and a variety of different diets. Except, that is, for one: the relatively new (in evolutionary terms) Western diet that most of us now are eating. What an extraordinary achievement for a civilization: to have developed the one diet that reliably makes its people sick! (While it is true that we generally live longer than people used to, or than people in some traditional cultures do, most of our added years owe to gains in infant mortality and child health, not diet.) There is actually a third, very hopeful fact that flows from these two: People who get off the Western diet see dramatic improvements in their health. We have good research to suggest that the effects of the Western diet can be rolled back, and relatively quickly.
”
”
Michael Pollan (Food Rules: An Eater's Manual)
“
Sometimes I ask myself, why didn’t they all just shut the fuck up, you know? Not just my boss, but all of those pampered parasites. They had the means to stay way outta harm’s way, so why didn’t they use it; go to Antarctica or Greenland or just stay where they were but stay the hell outta the public eye? But then again, maybe they couldn’t, like a switch you just can’t turn off. Maybe it’s what made them who they were in the first place. But what the hell do I know?
”
”
Max Brooks (World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War)
“
(It’s about here our Tinfoil Hat readers start cheering wildly)! The Camp Century site beneath the Greenland ice sheet was selected by US Army engineers in May, 1959. Construction began in 1960 and it was soon a fully-fledged subterranean city that ran entirely on nuclear
”
”
James Morcan (The Orphan Conspiracies: 29 Conspiracy Theories from The Orphan Trilogy)
“
I can’t imagine that anything like the Christian image of hell actually exists. But lately I’ve been wondering about the ancient Greenlandic realm of the dead. If you consider all the unpleasantness you encounter while you’re alive, it seems improbable that it would all come to an end simply because you’re dead.
”
”
Peter Høeg (Smilla's Sense of Snow)
“
Greenland is unable to join FIFA because not enough grass grows there for a soccer field. Due to challenging weather conditions, soccer can only be played four months out of the year.
”
”
Tyler Backhause (1,000 Random Facts Everyone Should Know: A collection of random facts useful for the bar trivia night, get-together or as conversation starter.)
“
The media is just as complicit in highlighting our discord. I imagine that reporting on a nation at peace would be boring to cover twenty-four seven, so there’s no impetus to bring us together—again, unless there’s an alien attack. There’s nothing exciting about nothing happening. Ad buyers want eyeballs on programs. Harmony doesn’t sell; concord isn’t sexy. For example, Forbes reported on the Institute for Economics and Peace in their Global Peace Index ranking Iceland as the most peaceful country in the world—quick, tell me one thing you know about that place. Wrong. Iceland is green and Greenland is ice.
”
”
Jen Lancaster (Welcome to the United States of Anxiety: Observations from a Reforming Neurotic)
“
She believes the king of the Hinterlands is going to attack her. Her fear of this is so great, she talks of nothing else. I promised to defend the Greenlands with the full might of Skandinay’s army—if she promised that I would inherit her crown. But now I have a problem—you’re not dead after all. How can I be heir to the Greenlands’s throne if you’re still alive?
”
”
Jennifer Donnelly (Poisoned)
“
Did you see Erik’s sword?” Patrick asked. “Yeah,” Beth said. “And he’s not afraid to use it. We have to stay away from him.” “Who is he?” Patrick asked. “Erik the Red discovered this land. He named it Greenland,” Beth said. “Before that he lived in Iceland.” “Why did he leave Iceland?” Patrick asked. “A powerful man stole Erik’s family treasures,” Beth said. “There was a fight between the families, and people died. The Icelanders wanted the fighting to stop. So they kicked Erik out.” “They kicked him out of his own country?” said Patrick. “Yes,” Beth said. “Erik had a ship and crew. So he sailed away to become a trader. That’s when he discovered Greenland. He settled here and raised a family.” “I’ve heard of Leif,” Patrick said. “My teacher said he discovered North America 500 years before Columbus did!” Just then the door opened and a woman came in. She was dressed much like Beth, except a scarf covered her blonde hair. A string of colorful beads hung between the brooches on her tunic. A large gold cross dangled from the string. Beth was relieved to see the cross. A Christian Viking was a peaceful Viking. At least she hoped so. “Children,” she said, “I am Thjodhild, the wife of Erik the Red and mother of Leif.
”
”
Marianne Hering (Voyage with the Vikings (Imagination Station, #1))
“
Now the “earth turns over” just as Immanuel Velikovsky predicted. A horrific 90-degrees tilt of the earth in which the weight of ice packs in
Greenland and Antarctica precipitates the 12,000-year cyclical catastrophe
foretold by so many from humanity’s past. T. S. Eliot stands avenged; the world
as we know it goes out with a whimper.
”
”
C. Elmon Meade (Adam & Eve's Ashes: Magnetic Pole Shift, Ancient Prophecy, and Catastrophism (Vol. I))
“
The haunting bellow of the sentry horns sounded across the Greenland Fjords as the night mists settled between the jagged, rocky, half-frozen shores. Ifar the Shepherd hurried from his flock. Beyond the coast skirted by his grazing land he could see the shadowy shape of the incoming knarr as it pushed through the deepening fog. Slowly the masts emerged above it. Ifar turned toward the hilltop. There stood the magnificent earthen Mead Hall of King Lief, son of Eirik the Red. Though the karls who worked the lands already came running from the fishing houses and the farms and the lumber sites, Ifar could not pass up the opportunity. He gathered his horn from hip and blew with all his might.
”
”
Max Davine (Spirits of the Ice Forest)
“
Then my sentence remains death and I will take it.’ Freydis said. ‘As a skjoldmoy, with a battle-axe in my hand. But I will make Valhalla a place on earth before it happens. I will make Vinland the gates to all of the Nordic Empire and they will be open for all eternity to those persecuted by these one-God heathens, wherever they may be.
”
”
Max Davine (Spirits of the Ice Forest)
“
The amount of water on the earth is essentially fixed. Almost all of it (some 97 percent) is in the oceans, and almost all of the rest is on the land—in ice and snow (especially the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets), in lakes and rivers, and in groundwater. But as we saw in Chapter 2, the one hundred-thousandth of the earth’s water that resides in its atmosphere plays a central role in climate—water vapor is the most important greenhouse gas, and clouds account for most of the earth’s albedo.
”
”
Steven E. Koonin (Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters)
“
CCP analyst Jichang Lulu has explored the localisation of united front influence activities in the Nordic countries, where local officials with considerable decision-making power are targeted for ‘friendly contact’ because they are insulated from strategic debates in the capital cities and do not have the expertise to understand Beijing’s intentions and tactics.1 He notes that Beijing has been actively cultivating political influence in Greenland, which Beijing sees as important for resource supply and for being an Arctic state. The strategy includes investments, an attempt to acquire a derelict naval base, and political work on Greenland’s elites, activities that have rung alarm bells in Denmark.
”
”
Clive Hamilton (Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World)
“
15 million years ago ice sheets began forming over Greenland, and by the beginning of the Quaternary the cooling had passed the threshold for the North Pole’s ice cap to begin expanding. We entered the current phase of pulsing ice ages.23 It seems the Earth has been committed to a concerted effort towards cooling down. What grand-scale planetary processes have been conspiring to drive this global chilling? Gases like carbon dioxide and methane, as well as water vapour, in the atmosphere act like the panes of glass in a greenhouse: they allow the short-wavelength visible sunlight to shine right through and heat the Earth, but block the longer-wavelength infrared light given off by the warm planet surface. The effect of these greenhouse gases is to trap heat energy from escaping back into space, and so insulate the planet, leading to higher temperatures. Any mechanism that reduces the amount of these greenhouse gases in the air will therefore drive a global cooling.
”
”
Lewis Dartnell (Origins: How the Earth Shaped Human History)
“
The French cranium measurers ran into serious problems in Greenland.
”
”
Peter Høeg (Smilla's Sense of Snow)
“
It was a map. A heart-shaped map. “A cordiform projection,” Thomas told her. She looked up at him excitedly. “It does not distort area. Look how small Greenland is.” He smiled. “I will confess that I purchased it more for its heart-shaped properties.” She turned toward her family. “Is this not the most romantic gift you have ever seen?
”
”
Julia Quinn (Mr. Cavendish, I Presume (Two Dukes of Wyndham, #2))
“
In his research, Kevin Wood was interested to know whether the travails of these driven souls could—as many thought—be connected climatically to Europe’s “Little Ice Age,” a period of particularly cold winters that went on intermittently for several centuries beginning in around AD 1400. One can blame the Little Ice Age for the failure of Norse colonies in Greenland and Napoleon’s defeat in Russia.
”
”
Elliot Rappaport (Reading the Glass: A Captain's View of Weather, Water, and Life on Ships)
“
In this trembling moment, with light armor under several flags rolling across northern Syria, with civilians beaten to death in the streets of Occupied Palestine, with fires roaring across the vineyards of California, and forests being felled to ensure more space for development, with student loans from profiteers breaking the backs of the young, and with Niagaras of water falling into the oceans from every sector of Greenland, in this moment, is it still possible to face the gathering darkness, and say to the physical Earth, and to all its creatures, including ourselves, fiercely and without embarrassment, I love you, and to embrace fearlessly the burning world?
”
”
Barry Lopez (Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World: Essays)
“
Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas in the Earth's atmosphere that traps the sun's heat. The amount of carbon dioxide in the air has risen steadily since the nineteenth century and is now at it's highest levels in 800,000 years. As a result, global temperatures are also rising: 2020 was one of the hottest years on record. But the planet is not warming evenly. The polar regions are heating up five times faster than anywhere else on Earth.
As a result, polar habitats are changing dramatically. Snow covers the Arctic for fewer days each decade, and the glaciers over Greenland and Antarctica are melting away. Sea ice is changing, too, getting thinner and covering less ocean. Polar bears depend on Arctic summer sea ice for hunting and traveling, but within a few decades, there might be none left.
Changes in climate and habitat have other consequences for polar animals. Some adaptions that supported survival are becoming unhelpful or even harmful. For example, blubber keeps marine mammals warm in cold water (see page 13). As temperatures continue to rise, the same blubber could cause those animals to overheat. When days get longer, ptarmigan turn brown for camouflage when the snow melts (see page 20). If warmer spring temperatures melt snow before the days lengthen, birds that are still white will be more visible to predators. As climate chance continues, these and other polar species may find it harder to persist.
”
”
L.E. Carmichael (Polar: Wildlife at the Ends of the Earth)
“
You can try to cover up depression in various ways. You can listen to Bach's compositions for the organ in Our Saviour's Church. You can arrange a line of good cheer in powder form on a pocket mirror with a razor blade and ingest it with a straw. You can call for help. For instance, by telephone, so that you know who's listening.
That's the European method. Hoping to work your way out of problems through action.
I take the Greenlandic way. It consists of submerging yourself in the dark mood. Putting your defeat under a microscope and dwelling on the sight.
”
”
Peter Høeg (Smilla's Sense of Snow)
“
She was soon to renounce any association with the Fourth International when they persisted in calling the Soviet Union a ‘degenerated workers state’ and its Eastern European satellites ‘deformed workers states’. At the end of his life Pablo would acknowledge that Sedova was right long before he came to share her view, although he rather undercut the acknowledgement by putting it down – in a throwaway remark, admittedly – to ‘women’s intuition’.
”
”
Hall Greenland (The well dressed revolutionary: The Odyssey of Michel Pablo in the age of uprisings)
“
In France, Cornelius Castoriadis, Claude Lefort and Jean-François Lyotard left to form Socialisme ou Barbarie, which soon had an energetic presence in Britain as well. SouB, as it was known, envisaged the totalitarian bureaucratic society as a universal threat very much in the same way as Orwell did in 1984.
”
”
Hall Greenland (The well dressed revolutionary: The Odyssey of Michel Pablo in the age of uprisings)
“
To err is human; but machines also make mistakes. These same systems have been responsible for several near-catastrophic false alarms. Once, in the 1950s, early-warning radars interpreted a flock of swans as a fleet of Russian MiG fighter jets en route to the U.S. by way of the North Pole. In October 1960, computers at the ground radar site in Thule, Greenland, misread the moon rising up over Norway as being the radar returns from 1,000 attacking ICBMs. In 1979, a simulation test tape mistakenly inserted into a NORAD computer deceived analysts into thinking the U.S. was under attack by Russian nuclear-armed ICBMs and nuclear ballistic submarines.
”
”
Annie Jacobsen (Nuclear War: A Scenario)
“
The Eskimos believed that the Europeans had come to Greenland to learn manners and virtues.
”
”
Will Durant (Our Oriental Heritage (Story of Civilization 1))
“
Le propriétaire. Dag n’aime pas ce mot. Dans le contexte des relations raciales en Amérique, les rapprochements sont inévitables. Au cours des négociations avec la ligue, on trouve toujours un joueur pour comparer la NBA à « une plantation », et Dag refuse en général de cautionner cette interprétation. Dans les plantations, personne n’a jamais gagné des millions de dollars pour faire la pub d’une marque de baskets. Néanmoins, force est de constater que la classe des propriétaires ressemble à un négatif des joueurs de la ligue. Il sait bien qu’il n’est pas en son pouvoir de balayer des siècles d’inégalités. Mais arracher un contrat max à Jay Gladstone, c’est autre chose. Ça, il sent qu’il en est capable
”
”
Seth Greenland
“
Using essentially the same techniques, we can use them to measure much longer times than carbon dating reaches. For example, isotopes of uranium and lead have been used to obtain the age of mineral samples (gneiss) from western Greenland. They give concordant ages in the neighborhood of 3.6 billion years. Thus, we infer that those rocks formed 3.6 billion years ago, and have undergone little chemical processing since. In this way, we learn that Earth has existed as a solid planet for a significant fraction—more than a quarter—of the lifetime of the visible universe.
”
”
Frank Wilczek (Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality)
“
Destiny is a funny thing. Once I thought I was destined to become Emperor of Greenland, sole monarch over its 52,000 inhabitants. Then I thought I was destined to build a Polynesian longship in my garage. I was wrong then, but I've got it now. I'm the destined protector of this place. I'm this city's superhero.
”
”
Ben Edlund (The Tick Omnibus Vol. 1: Sunday Through Wednesday)
“
I love a mysterious underground and have exploited this in many of my books: the ice tunnels of Greenland, the volcanic tubes of Iceland, the mysterious passageways beneath an ancient African hillside or a Buddhist monastery in central China. And of course, London's famous tube system, setting for my book LONDON UNDERGROUND. It's a funny sort of fixation, especially given my mother's claustrophobia, which I saw her deal with on many occasions. We once lined up to take a tour into the Lascaux Caverns in France to see the ancient cave paintings. My mother didn't make it past the first quirky turn into the depths, and she sent me on by myself. Given her interest in history and archaeology, which she used as the basis for a series of mysteries she published and which inspired my own writing, it always surprised me she still loved to write about places she could never visit.
”
”
Chris Angus
“
In 2008 geneticists at the University of York discovered that mice have left genetic trails in much the same way as humans. Rodents that traveled into Orkney on Viking ships ended up leaving much of their DNA in the mouse populations on the island. Indeed, the Scandinavian mice left a pattern so clear that scientists have found they can draw an accurate map of human movements based on mouse movements alone. A more recent study tracked marauding mice of the early tenth century into Greenland from Iceland and before that from either Norway or the northern part of Britain.
”
”
Christine Kenneally (The Invisible History of the Human Race: How DNA and History Shape Our Identities and Our Futures)
“
Although there is a human settlement at Jakobshavn, Greenland is an inhuman landscape of never-ending wastes.
”
”
Richard Davenport-Hines (Voyagers of the Titanic: Passengers, Sailors, Shipbuilders, Aristocrats, and the Worlds They Came From)
“
Climates were relatively warm during the geological period referred to as the Cretaceous, which lasted from about 145 to about 66 million years BP. Warm conditions persisted to about 5 million years BP. The forest-tundra boundary extended at that time to latitudes as high as 82° N, some 2,500 km north of its present location, occupying regions of Greenland now permanently covered in ice. There were times when frost-tolerant vegetation was common in Spitsbergen (paleolatitude 79° N), when alligators and flying lemurs lived happily on Ellesmere Island (paleolatitude 78° N), and when palm trees, incapable of surviving even temporary frost conditions, could grow and survive in Central Asia.
”
”
Michael B. McElroy (Energy and Climate: Vision for the Future)
“
A sharp pulse of warming was observed both in Greenland and in the tropics beginning at about 15,000 years BP. This was followed by an abrupt climate reversal, a resumption of near glacial conditions that set in at about 13,000 years BP and lasted about 2,000 years. This cold snap, referred to as the Younger Dryas, was apparently global in scale and is usually attributed to a change in the circulation of the Atlantic Ocean. It is interesting to note that the final cold-to-warm transition that marked the end of the Younger Dryas appears to have taken place over a time interval as brief as 20 years, highlighting the fact that important changes in climate can take place extremely rapidly—something
”
”
Michael B. McElroy (Energy and Climate: Vision for the Future)
“
Christopher came up behind her. As Beatrix turned to face him, he searched her face with a gently quizzical gaze. “If you like, we can spend our first night together here,” he said. “But if this doesn’t suit you, we’ll go to Phelan House.”
Beatrix could hardly speak. “You did this for me?”
He nodded. “I asked Lord Westcliff if we might stay the night here. And he had no objections to a little redecorating. Do you--”
He was interrupted as Beatrix flung herself at him and wrapped her arms tightly around his neck.
Christopher held her, his hands coursing slowly over her back and hips. His lips found the tender skin of her cheeks, her chin, the yielding softness of her mouth. Through the descending diaphanous layers of pleasure, Beatrix answered him blindly, taking a shivering breath as his long fingers curved beneath her jaw. He shaped her lips with his own, his tongue questing gently. The taste of him was smooth and subtle and masculine. Intoxicating. Needing more of him, she struggled to draw him deeper, to kiss him harder, and he resisted with a quiet laugh.
“Wait. Easy…love, there’s another part of the surprise that I don’t want you to miss.”
“Where?” Beatrix asked drowsily, her hand searching over his front.
Christopher gave a muffled laugh, taking her by the shoulders and easing her away. He stared down at her, his gray eyes glowing.
“Listen,” he whispered.
As the thrumming of her own heart quieted, Beatrix heard music. Not instruments, but human voices joined in harmony. Bemused, she went to the window and looked out. A smile lit her face.
A small group of officers from Christopher’s regiment, still in uniform, were standing in a row and singing a slow, haunting ballad.
Were I laid on Greenland’s coast,
And in my arms embrac’d my lass;
Warm amidst eternal frost,
Too soon the half year’s night would pass.
And I would love you all the day.
Ev’ry night would kiss and play,
If with me you’d fondly stray.
Over the hills and far away…
“Our song,” Beatrix whispered, as the sweet strains floated up to them.
“Yes.
”
”
Lisa Kleypas (Love in the Afternoon (The Hathaways, #5))
“
Listen,” he whispered.
As the thrumming of her own heart quieted, Beatrix heard music. Not instruments, but human voices joined in harmony. Bemused, she went to the window and looked out. A smile lit her face.
A small group of officers from Christopher’s regiment, still in uniform, were standing in a row and singing a slow, haunting ballad.
Were I laid on Greenland’s coast,
And in my arms embrac’d my lass;
Warm amidst eternal frost,
Too soon the half year’s night would pass.
And I would love you all the day.
Ev’ry night would kiss and play,
If with me you’d fondly stray.
Over the hills and far away…
“Our song,” Beatrix whispered, as the sweet strains floated up to them.
“Yes.”
Beatrix lowered to the floor and braced her folded arms on the windowsill…the same place where she had lit so many candles for a soldier fighting in a faraway land.
Christopher joined her at the window, kneeling with his arms braced around her. At the conclusion of the song, Beatrix blew the officers a kiss. “Thank you, gentlemen,” she called down to them. “I will treasure this memory always.”
One of them volunteered, “Perhaps you’re not aware of it, Mrs. Phelan, but according to Rifle Brigade wedding tradition, every man on the groom’s honor guard gets to kiss the bride on her wedding night.”
“What rot,” Christopher retorted amiably. “The only Rifles wedding tradition I know of is to avoid getting married in the first place.”
“Well, you bungled that one, old fellow.” The group chortled.
“Can’t say as I blame him,” one of them added. “You are a vision, Mrs. Phelan.”
“As fair as moonlight,” another said.
“Thank you,” Christopher said. “Now stop wooing my wife, and take your leave.”
“We started the job,” one of the officers said. “It’s left to you to finish it, Phelan.”
And with cheerful catcalls and well wishes, the Rifles departed.
“They’re taking the horse with them,” Christopher said, a smile in his voice. “You’re well and truly stranded with me now.
”
”
Lisa Kleypas (Love in the Afternoon (The Hathaways, #5))
“
Global temperatures have been irregularly declining for at least 3,000 years based on Greenland ice core data similarly to what has occurred near the end of previous interglacial periods. The increases during the Twentieth Century have been well within normal bounds over the last 800,000 years for which we have ice core data from Antarctica.
”
”
Alan Carlin (Environmentalism Gone Mad: How a Sierra Club Activist and Senior EPA Analyst Discovered a Radical Green Energy Fantasy)
“
London was really cool. We stayed there last night, with friends of Kendra’s mom. My mom and dad thought we should have a rest before we came over to the mainland.”
Kelly has lain down on her tummy on the lounger, face on her arms, but now she lifts her head, squinting in the sun, and stares incredulously at Paige.
“When you came over to the mainland?” she asks. “You do know that the United Kingdom is a completely different country from Italy, right?”
Paige’s blond eyebrows knit in confusion.
“But it’s all part of Europe?” she says, looking at Kendra for help. “I mean, England’s like an island, off the mainland of Europe.”
“We’re a separate country,” Kelly says coldly. “It would be like saying that Greenland’s an island off the mainland of the United States.”
“Isn’t it?” Paige says, giggling helplessly. “I was never very good at geography.”
“Kelly’s right,” Kendra drawls. “Some of us Americans do have half an idea where other countries in the world are located.”
“Are you two friends?” I ask, because I can see that Kelly’s still seething.
“Our parents know each other from the country club,” Paige says, not a whit upset by being effectively called an idiot by Kendra. “Our moms play tennis together on Saturdays.”
“And our dads golf together,” Kendra says self-mockingly now. “It’s all super-cozy. I wanted to come to Italy for the summer, and I found this course online--”
“But her mom didn’t want her to go on her own, and she told my mom, and my mom thought it would be a great learning experience for me--” Paige bursts in enthusiastically.
“And teach you where some other flipping countries are besides your own,” Kelly mutters sotto voce.
”
”
Lauren Henderson (Flirting in Italian (Flirting in Italian #1))
“
No, it’s … sometimes it’s that, but sometimes … I’m sent for an idea. In Greenland I was sent for a man, but I think I was sent also for the ice, because it was melting and the world will change, and in Syria the dead were dead already and I was sent for a poet who had become … Sometimes I am sent for an idea, as well as a person.” “And
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Claire North (The End of the Day)
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You went to Greenland...on purpose," Naz said.
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Robin Sloan (Sourdough)
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Like many other sharks, Greenland sharks are equipped with so-called ampullae of Lorenzini. Through these jelly-filled, half-inch-long ampullae, it can sense changes in electric fields down to a few billionths of a volt. That’s probably how it detects prey buried in the sand and how it manages to sneak up on seals lying or sleeping on the ocean floor before attacking.
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Morten A. Strøksnes (Shark Drunk: The Art of Catching a Large Shark from a Tiny Rubber Dinghy in a Big Ocean)
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There were people you cared about. Maybe not many, but there were a few and when you cared about them enough it hurt.
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Greenland, Seth
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the impact of the rape, pillage and anarchy that marked the fifth century as the Goths, Alans, Vandals and Huns rampaged across Europe and North Africa is hard to exaggerate. Literacy levels plummeted; building in stone all but disappeared, a clear sign of collapse of wealth and ambition; long-distance trade that once took pottery from factories in Tunisia as far as Iona in Scotland collapsed, replaced by local markets dealing only with exchange of petty goods; and as measured from pollution in polar ice-caps in Greenland there was a major contraction in smelting work, with levels falling back to those of prehistoric times.
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Peter Frankopan (The Silk Roads: A New History of the World)
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The familiar Mercator projection used in maps of the earth gives a good idea of distances and directions near the equator, but produces horrible dostortions near the poles, with Greenland swelling to many times its actual size. In the same way, it is one sign of being in a gravitational field that there is no one freely falling frame of reference in which gravitational and inertial effects cancel everywhere.
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Steven Weinberg (Dreams of a Final Theory: The Scientist's Search for the Ultimate Laws of Nature)
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We do not see marriage as you greenlanders do,” Shanvah said. “The Evejah tells us love is boundless. It does not dishonor the Damajah to share. A portion of infinity remains infinite.
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Peter V. Brett (The Core (The Demon Cycle, #5))
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Developed by Susan Kaiser Greenland (2010), the Inner Kids program teaches the “new ABCs”—attention, balance, and compassion. Through direct instruction, games, and other activities, the program aims to develop awareness of inner experience (thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations), awareness of outer experience (other people, places, and things), and awareness of how these two blend together.
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Tish Jennings (Mindfulness for Teachers: Simple Skills for Peace and Productivity in the Classroom (The Norton Series on the Social Neuroscience of Education Book 0))
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Have not the popish missionaries surmounted all those difficulties which we have generally thought to be insuperable? Have not the missionaries of the Unitas Fratrum, or Moravian Brethren, encountered the scorching heat of Abyssinia, and the frozen climes of Greenland, and Labrador, their difficult languages, and savage manners? Or have not English traders, for the sake of gain, surmounted all those things which have generally been counted insurmountable obstacles in the way of preaching the gospel? Witness the trade to Persia, the East-Indies, China, and Greenland, yea even the accursed Slave-Trade on the coasts of Africa. Men can insinuate themselves into the favour of the most barbarous clans, and uncultivated tribes, for the sake of gain; and how different soever the circumstances of trading and preaching are, yet this will prove the possibility of ministers being introduced there; and if this is but thought a sufficient reason to make the experiment, my point is gained.
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William Carey (An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens In Which the Religious State of the Different Nations of ... of Further Undertakings, Are Considered)
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But none of the moderns have equalled the Moravian Brethren in this good work; they have sent missions to Greenland, Labrador, and several of the West-Indian Islands, which have been blessed for good. They have likewise sent to Abyssinia, in Africa, but what success they have had I cannot tell.
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William Carey (An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens In Which the Religious State of the Different Nations of ... of Further Undertakings, Are Considered)
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the Asian War Complex, appeared in Alaska. It spread rapidly through the continent—east to Greenland and south to California and the American southwest. The central innovation of the package was the recurved bow, backed with sinew. This was a much more powerful weapon than the wooden self bow already known to the Native Americans, and came with body armor often made from slats of wood or bone. Clearly, it wasn’t just a hunting tool: it was used for war. Indeed, the appearance of the Asian War Complex in an area is usually followed by signs of intense warfare, such as a profusion of barbed bone arrowheads found embedded in human vertebrae.21
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Peter Turchin (Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth)
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In the year 0982, Gunnbjorn Ulfsson reported that he had journeyed to another land having fertile green fields, about 200 miles to the west of Iceland. Out of duress, Eric the Red now 32 years old, decided to uproot his family and move there. Eric and his family sailed the treacherous distance between the two landmasses safely and named the new location Greenland. He chose this name because it reflected the grassy, valleys he discovered during this warm period of the island’s history.
Three years later when he could return to Iceland, he told astounding stories about where he and his family had settled. His stories must have sounded inviting since they encouraged many other settlers to join them there, especially considering that a famine had devastated Iceland. Not knowing any better, they had severely overworked the cold soil in Iceland, putting their very existence into jeopardy. Knowing that they could not survive another winter, 980 people on 25 boats left for the arduous journey to Greenland. It must have been a cold, rough crossing because only 14 boats succeeded in making it. However, Eric later learned that some of the boats had survived and had managed to return safely to Iceland. In time, there were about 5,000 settlers in Greenland. The official records indicate that two sizable Norse settlements had been founded in fjords on the southwestern coast of the island. Other smaller ones were located on the same coast as far north as present day Nuuk. Most of the settlements which were founded in about the year 1,000, remained inhabited until well into “The Little Ice Age,” which started in 1350 and lasted for approximately 500 years. In the beginning when the weather was considerably warmer, about 400 farms were started by the Viking farmers. However later, the extreme cold and glacial ice made farming nearly impossible in these frigid northern latitudes. Recently, archaeologists discovered a Viking village that was radiocarbon dated back to circa 1430.
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Hank Bracker
“
Sharks are the most hardy and adaptable of any large animal ever created by evolution. Some smaller species like lampreys, horseshoe crabs, sponges, and jellyfish have been around for longer but they seem somehow like anomalies or accidents. On the other hand, several types of very big sharks like the anvil shark, goblin shark, frilled shark, and possibly even the greenland shark have been around for forever and a day. No other species can match this record. They have survived everything that has been thrown at them including volcanic eruptions, ice ages, meteor impacts, parasites, bacteria, viruses, acidification, and other catastrophes that have lead to mass extinctions. By the time the dinosaurs appears, sharks had already existed for eons. And they continued to thrive even as the dinosaurs and countless other species went extinct.
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Morten A. Strøksnes (Havboka)
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Tim Lenton from the University of East Anglia told the Cambridge meeting: “We are close to being committed to a collapse of the Greenland ice sheet, but we don’t think we have passed the tipping point yet.” How long have we got? Maybe less than a decade.
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Fred Pearce (With Speed and Violence: Why Scientists Fear Tipping Points in Climate Change)
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But don’t give me, if I can’t have the dress,
a trip to Greenland, or grim
trip to the moon. The moon should come here. Let him
make the trip down, spread on my dark floor some dim
marvel, and if a success
that I stoop to pick up and wear,
I could ask nothing more.
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Marianne Moore (Complete Poems)
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don't be like ash in stormy day
but be a veterant fertile tree in a greenland
and u will never go away
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mido matary
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The Greenland ice sheet preserves the record of elevated levels of lead released into the atmosphere by Roman-era silver smelting. From
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Susan P. Mattern (The Prince of Medicine: Galen in the Roman Empire)
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Hadn't I wanted this? I had actively participated in every moment of the creation of this life. So why didn't I see myself in any of it? The only thing more impossible than staying was leaving. I didn't wanna hurt anybody, I wanted to slip quietly out the back door and not stop running until I reached Greenland. Instead I made a decision: to pray.. you know...like... to God. And it was such a foreign concept to me that I swear I almost began with: "I'm a big fan of your work.
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Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love)
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Where will that be?’ ‘Either Greenland or Iceland.’ ‘How shall we know which is which?’ ‘If it’s green, it’ll be Iceland. If it’s icy it’ll be Greenland.
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Ernest Schofield (Arctic Airmen: The RAF in Spitsbergen and North Russia, 1942)
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Da een blev straffet, efterdi han havde Medhustruer, svarede han, at han fulte sin Tilbøyelighed, som var at være løsagtig, og spurte, hvi GUd ikke havde skabt ham med samme Temperament som en Deel andre, hvilke kunde lade sig nøye med een Hustrue. Den samme undskyldte paa lige Maade sin Vrede, sigende, at Erfarenhed viser, at et Menneske er skabt meere vreedagtigt end et andet, og at, hvad som er en medfødt, kand ikke tilregnes ham, men Skaberen. Grønlænderne meene, at Moralitet best læres hos dem, hvorudover, naar de see et fromt Menneske af andre Nationer, sige de, at han er saa from og skikkelig som en Karolek, det er, en Grønlænder.
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Ludvig Holberg
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Een, som af Missionario blev opmuntret til at troe, sagde: Jeg troer dine Ord; thi du kommer mig for at være en skikkelig og sandru Mand: Men jeg kand ikke saa læt troe, hvad den haver skrevet, som staaer i denne Bog; thi jeg kiender Skribenten ikke.
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Ludvig Holberg (Epistler)
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In accordance with this difference in the productions of the different regions of the earth, there seems to be a difference in the constitutions of the races of men formed to inhabit them. The tribes that inhabit Greenland and Kamtschatka can not preserve their accustomed health and vigor on any other than animal food. If put upon a diet of vegetables they soon begin to pine away. The reverse is true of the vegetable-eaters of the tropics.
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Jacob Abbott (Genghis Khan (Makers of History, #21))
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Global warming is a big problem, and to solve it we have to stop listening to disinformation. We have to pay attention to our science and harness the power of our engineering. Rome may not be burning, but Greenland is melting, and we are still fiddling. We all need a better understanding of what science really is, how to recognize real science when we see it, and how to separate it from the garbage.
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Naomi Oreskes (Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming)
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If conditions along the eastern coast are right, you can actually see Iceland floating on the distant horizon.
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Damjan Končnik (Greenland: The End of the World)
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Drawn in by their curiosity, the brothers began turning them aside – and discovered a grave containing the frozen remains of eight women and children.
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Damjan Končnik (Greenland: The End of the World)
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My foggy Arctic dreams were crystallizing. I would point my compass north and follow in the footsteps of those who first came this way over a thousand years ago.
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Damjan Končnik (Greenland: The End of the World)
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It felt like the Blair Witch Project.
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Damjan Končnik (Greenland: The End of the World)
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an Arctic desert with no rain and minimal vegetation that was every bit as desolate and bleak as the Tibetan plateau. Along the way we passed what is billed as “the world’s most northerly golf course”, laid out in 1986 by a couple of bored helicopter pilots working for Greenland Air with the help of a night watchman from the Kangerlussuaq Hotel.
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Richard Starks (Greenland for $1.99)
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waters of forbidding Lake Motzfeld, set among some of the area's most beautiful and treacherous terrain.
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Damjan Končnik (Greenland: The End of the World)
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I was, alone at the end of the world, standing in the rubble of the biggest mystery of the Middle Ages.
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Damjan Končnik (Greenland: The End of the World)
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Although they couldn't dig up any direct evidence about the mysterious disappearance of the Vikings, they developed a theory, at the time generally accepted, that explained things something like this:
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Damjan Končnik (Greenland: The End of the World)
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More concerning, the decade to 2010 was the warmest that Greenland has seen — at least in the 120 years for which records have been kept. Furthermore, the Arctic summers of 2010, 2011 and 2012 were the warmest since at least the 1400s.
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Richard Starks (Greenland for $1.99)
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Erik called the land Greenland because the name would encourage people to go there.
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Else Roesdahl (The Vikings)
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The world of the Vikings was extensive. It stretched round the whole of Europe: from Scandinavia to the Mediterranean, along both easterly and westerly routes, and to the north-west to Iceland, Greenland and America. Throughout the Viking Age many sought their fortune in distant lands. Some remained there, others returned home and the tough life took its toll.
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Else Roesdahl (The Vikings)
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In fact the Chinese, the Russians, Eskimos from Greenland, and sub-Saharan Africans are all getting fatter, as is every other population when economic conditions improve and there is increased access to cheaper food.
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James B. Johnson (The Alternate-Day Diet Revised: The Original Up-Day, Down-Day Eating Plan to Turn on Your "Skinny Gene," Shed the Pounds, and Live a Longer and Healthier Life)
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I had the urge to caress the small of her back with my fingertips. That thought was immediately tried, sentenced to ten years’ hard labor, and exiled to Siberia.
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Seth Greenland (I Regret Everything: A Love Story)
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The stereo played an abstract tone poem by a pianist who sounded as if he had OD’d on Nembutal five minutes before the recording session.
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Seth Greenland (Shining City: A Novel)
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Min mor snakker højere og højere, i takt med at hun bliver mere beruset. Hun får en hæslig stemme, som ikke er hendes. Den stemme hader jeg mest af alt i hele verden. En stemme der ændrer sig, når den har fået en slurk af det, den godt kan lide. En stemme der bliver venlig. En stemme der lyder som frygtløshedens stemme. En stemme med maske på. Selv hendes hilsen ændrer sig. Hej. Jeg har lyttet alt for meget til den stemme.
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Sørine Steenholdt (Zombieland)
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The New Continent
A Norwegian coin of the Viking era was once found in Maine; however, no indication of a settlement was found that could be used to verify the exact location of any landings. Perhaps it just became too cold and the growing season too short for them to linger on in this cold region. What is relatively certain is that it was not uncommon for the Vikings to sail their boats, called knars, west from Greenland to present-day Labrador. During the summer months, the warmer currents carried them north along the western coast of Greenland to what is now known as the Davis Strait, and from there they most likely headed due west for about two hundred miles over open water to Baffin Island. The Labrador Current could then have taken them as far south as the coasts of Newfoundland, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia and possibly Maine and Cape Cod.
Read & Share the daily blogs and weekly commentaries “From the Bridge” by Captain Hank Bracker, author of the award winning book “The Exciting Story of Cuba” available at Amazon.com.
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Hank Bracker
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Snugs lived in Greenland. Magical Greenland with Santa Claus, and moose that were big, with brown, soft fur, pink tongues and big lips. They also had huge antlers that they used to knit or to fight other moose when they felt like it, which wasn't very often, thank goodness
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Suzy Davies (Snugs The Snow Bear (Snugs Series #1))
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I was where I craved to be, walking alone in the presence of wild solitude, the treasure of aloneness seeping from the sunlight, from the blue waters, from the patterned stones.
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William E. Glassley (A Wilder Time: Notes from a Geologist at the Edge of the Greenland Ice)
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We are a speck on a flowing river of entropy that still gushes from an unfathomable beginning nearly fourteen billion years ago. We’re enthralled by a story we suspect the stars possess, but we remain unable to grasp its outline. We wander over landscapes, looking for histories the stones sequester, hoping there will be in them a flicker of an insight that will expose something worth cherishing.
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William E. Glassley (A Wilder Time: Notes from a Geologist at the Edge of the Greenland Ice)
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Wilderness speaks with unmitigated honesty. Every belief and imagining that we bring with us as we enter such spaces also reflect back to us, but in a form that can be difficult to recognize.
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William E. Glassley (A Wilder Time: Notes from a Geologist at the Edge of the Greenland Ice)
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Regret expands. It matures. It accrues strength and mass. It is a living organism.
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Seth Greenland (I Regret Everything: A Love Story)
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That was horrifying. Fear had blinded me to this but the situation had changed. What if I were found out? Exposed. Prosecuted. Disbarred. My life would crumble. I would have no job, my prospects would be dismal, and it was impossible to know how Spaulding would react. And the only person whose opinion mattered, the only one, was Spaulding.
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Seth Greenland (I Regret Everything: A Love Story)
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I couldn’t allow myself to have what I desperately wanted which was not a partnership but for Spaulding Simonson to accompany me. I missed being with her, the sense of adventure she brought, that feeling I had of being stupidly alive when we were together. Why did I need to deprive myself?
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Seth Greenland (I Regret Everything: A Love Story)
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Qualunque cosa sia non puo essere cosi male. L’amore è difficile.
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Seth Greenland (I Regret Everything: A Love Story)
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I don’t want to struggle to describe things anymore. I want to let experience happen without the filter of intellect.
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Seth Greenland (I Regret Everything: A Love Story)