Guinness Birthday Quotes

I never knew anybody . . . who found life simple. I think a life or a time looks simple when you leave out the details.

In war everybody is a prisoner.

I think there is no way to write about being alone. To write is to tell something to somebody to communicate to others. . . . Solitude is noncommunication, the absence of others, the presence of a self sufficient to itself.

In general she had found that the main drawback in being a man was that conversations were less interesting.

I learned that the story has no beginning, and no story has an end. That the story is all muddle, all middle. That the story is never true, but that the lie is indeed a child of silence.

What it made me think about above all is how incredibly much we learn from our birthday to last day - from where the horsies live to the origin of the stars. How rich we are in knowledge, and in all that lies around us yet to learn. Billionaires, all of us.

I go on writing in both respectable and despised genres because I respect them all, rejoice in their differences, and reject only the prejudice and ignorance that dismisses any book, unread, as not worth reading." -- "On Despising Genres," essay

she had never known who she was at all, except sometimes for a moment in meditation, when her I am became It is, and she breathed the stars

They forget that human beings, while whining after the simple life, thrive on complexity.

Thinking is one way of doing, and words are one way of thinking

Nothing in the world has tentacles or fins or paws or claws. Nothing in the world soars. Nothing swims. Nothing purrs, barks, growls, roars, chitters, trills, or cries repeatedly two notes, a descending fourth, for three months of the year. There are no months of the year. There is no moon. There is no year.

We shape each other to be human.

His authority was in fact immense; but he never stood on it. He sat down on it, comfortably, and invited you to sit down with him.

IF NOTHING IS VERY DIFFERENT FROM YOU, WHAT IS A LITTLE DIFFERENT FROM YOU IS VERY DIFFERENT FROM YOU

But a generation that knows only how to travel — can they teach a generation how to arrive?

History must be what we have escaped from. It is what we were, not what we are. History is what we need never do again.

What it made me think about above all is how incredibly much we learn between our birthday and last day—from where the horsies live to the origin of the stars. How rich we are in knowledge, and in all that lies around us yet to learn. Billionaires, all of us.

He mentally perceived words as having various sizes, densities, depths; words were dark stars, some small and dull and solid, some immense, complex, subtle, with a powerful gravity-field that attracted infinite meanings to them. Freedom was the biggest of the dark stars.

The conduct of a new sedoretu is to some extent, and wisely, prescribed by custom and sanctioned by religion. The first night after the ceremony of marriage belongs to the Morning and Evening couples; the second night to the Day and Night couples. Thereafter the four spouses may join as and when they please, but always and only by invitation given and accepted, and the arrangements are to be known to all four. Four souls and bodies and all the years of their four lives to come are in the balance in each of those decisions and invitations; passion, negative and positive, must find its channels, and trust must be established, lest the whole structure fail to found itself solidly, or destroy itself in selfishness and jealousy and grief.

Four and a half billion is a number almost beyond reckoning. The current Guinness world record for longevity is held by a French woman who lived to celebrate her 122nd birthday—so humans fall far short of living even for 4.5 billion seconds (about 144 years). All of recorded human history is much less than 4.5 billion minutes. And yet geologists claim that Earth has been around for more than 4.5 billion years.

Socrates remarked, “The misuse of language induces evil in the soul.

also I learned some words of the way she talked. One of them was techeg. Words like it are: companion, fights-beside-me, countrywoman or countryman, desired, lover, known-a-long-time; of all our words the one most like techeg is our word, in-my-heart. Their name Tegh was the same word as techeg; it meant they were all in one another’s heart. Ruaway and I were in each other’s heart. We were techeg.

I know Ada is flying in bliss, but I am lonely walking in the corridors without her. If you know how, please help me learn not to grieve her joy.

My advice to young writers is, if you can’t marry money, at least don’t marry envy.

Le Guin’s Rule: One person cannot do two fulltime jobs, but two persons can do three fulltime jobs — if they honestly share the work.

People need God the way a three-year-old needs a chainsaw.

What is it like to return from the dead? Not easy. Not for the one who returns, nor for his people. The place he occupied in their world has closed up, ceased to be, filled with accumulated change, habit, the doings and needs of others. He has been replaced. To return from the dead is to be a ghost: a person for whom there is no room.

If you write science fiction you can spell things the way you like, sometimes.

moieties

But I don’t know what my side is, he thought, as he went back to his chair by the window. The Liberation, of course, yes, but what is the Liberation? Not an ideal, the freedom of the enslaved. Not now. Never again. Since the Uprising, the Liberation is an army, a political body, a great number of people and leaders and would-be leaders, ambitions and greed clogging hopes and strength, a clumsy amateur semi-government lurching from violence to compromise, ever more complicated, never again to know the beautiful simplicity of the ideal, the pure idea of liberty. And

I want very much to live among my people, to learn who they are, now that I know with at least an uncertain certainty who I am.

Solitude is noncommunication, the absence of others, the presence of a self sufficient to itself.

He was like the knife that wounds, and like the wound. Everybody treated Luis with a difference, respectfully, liking him but not trying to get close to him. Only she knew that he was also the touch that heals the wound.

Nature,” on the original planet, had meant what was not controlled by human beings. “Nature” was what was substantially previous to control, the raw material for control, or what had escaped from control. Thus the areas of Dichew where few people lived, quadrants that were undesirably dry or cold or steep, had been called “nature,” “wilderness,” or “nature preserves.” In these areas lived the animals, which were also called “natural” or “wild.” And all the “animal” functions of the human body were therefore “natural” — eating, drinking, pissing, shitting, sex, reflex, sleep, shouting, and going off like a siren when somebody licked your clitoris.

No matter how you civilised it, the body remained somewhat wild, or savage, or natural. It had to keep up its animal functions, or die. It could never be fully tamed, fully controlled. Even plants, Luis learned from listening to Hsing’s father, however manipulated to serve their symbiotic functions, were not totally predictable or obedient; and the bacteria populations came up constantly with “wild” breeds, possibly dangerous mutations. The only things that could be perfectly controlled were inanimate, the matter of the world, the elements and compounds, solid, liquid, or gas, and the artifacts made from them. What about the controller, the civiliser itself, the mind? Was it civilised? Did it control itself?

The history in the bookscreens, Earth History, that appalling record of injustice, cruelty, enslavement, hatred, murder — that record, justified and glorified by every government and institution, of waste and misuse of human life, animal life, plant life, the air, the water, the planet? If that is who we are, what hope for us?

Sexuality and justice have little if anything in common.

M" Mnemosyne’s silent M drives me to the dictionary Her baby sister makes an n run. Youth does not tarry Those diaphanous, luminescent water jellies, Mnemiopsis, small as sneezes, I can only conjure as Knee me up, Sis Spelling? Easier to recall these beauties as invasive carnivorous, cannibalistic, and hermaphroditic (They eat each other and fuck themselves) Mnemonic is a device that helps me remember birthdays and phone numbers of those I no longer love but can recall in traces Or how to sequence pi to a thousand places as Guinness names me a mnemonist. Or my own birthday because my mother died the day before Just a handful of words end in mn, and the soul they limn: autumn, solemn, damn, condemn, the a capella hymn But hundreds contain mn. A standout: that Jurassic cephalopod, belemnite, long gone, yet its name and phallic fossil live on And should those Siamnese twins stand at the head, they’re led by a vowel that takes m by the hand and leaves n to bed another syllable. Amnesia. You are what you forget Still, the mother of all muses has a name hard to set Mnemiopsis, mnemonist, mnemonic, Mnemosyne— such elegance I should be able to recall: these words all begin with silence Perhaps her name once began with A: Out one day, bathing carefree in the Aegean, she fell for a creature she could feel but not see— say, a tentacled jelly—got entangled with the beast, lost the A, Tore her chiton, and returned in disarray Zeus said, Where’s the A I gave you on the birth of Calliope? She, recalling his trysts, yet savoring her berth, wanted no scene Saw in backward glance, the gem wedged in coral’s gritty teeth A’s so plebeian. Words are rife. Alcmene, Europa, Hera, adultery Few can spell my name yet spell I cast when lives are spent I am the Titan Mnemosyne, Goddess of All Memory, and off she went leaving Zeus to rue her gift and curse Yet wise manager, was hers not the golden purse?

As to his date of birth, Thomas says that no man knows this except by hearsay and that a man is ‘as good as his arteries and his activities, his rightness and truth and courage’. However, he adds: ‘I have now, in the desire to satisfy you, made investigations into the past which I have long neglected … I believe that I was born in London on the 18th January, 1841. I am no more certain of it than I am of the birthday of Julius Caesar. But that is what I think.

In her defence, it has to be mentioned that Thomas’s behaviour to his children must have seemed odd to a normal mother, not to say unfeeling and a little mean. He did not bother with Christmas or birthdays, maintaining that it was enough to feed children and look after them without giving them a lot of superfluous presents. Party frocks for the girls he also regarded as quite unnecessary; on nearly all occasions they were dressed in sailor suits like the boys.

Dizimi parçaladığımda ve yatmak zorunda kaldığımda," dedi, "zevk almadan yaşamanın bir anlamı olmadığına karar verdim." Bir sessizlikten sonra Hsing, alaycı bir ses tonuyla, "Saadet?" dedi. "Hayır. Saadet Sanal Gerçeksizliğin bir formu. Hayır, ben zevk diyorum. Gemide bunu hiç bilmiyordum. Sadece burada var. Ara sıra. Kayıtsız şartsız varoluş anları. Zevk." Hsing içini çekti. "Zor kazanılan," dedi. "A, evet." Bir süre sessizce oturdular. Güney rüzgârı sertçe esti, durdu, bu kez hafif hafif esti. Islak toprak ve fasulye çiçeği kokuyordu. Luis şöyle dedi: "'Diyorlar ki, ben nine olduğum zaman, sema altında Yürüyebilirmişim başka bir dünyada.

Sanırım yalnız olmayı yazabilmenin bir yolu yok. Yazmak, bir şeyi birine anlatmak, diğerleriyle iletişim kurmak. Metanet'in deyimiyle İS, iletişim sorunu. Yalnızlık iletişim kurmamak, diğerlerinin yokluğu, kendisine yeten kişiliğin varlığı.

Ben, "Buradaki öğrenimin sırasında bir şey öğrendim. Şarkılardan birinde," dedim ve şarkıyı Hainceye çevirmeye çalışırken duraksadım, "düşünmek yapmanın bir yoludur, kelimeler de düşünmenin bir yolu.

İnancın olmadığı yerde Tanrı da yoktur. Kuşkunun olduğu yerde ayak tökezler, el tutunamaz.

Birbirimizi biçimlendirip insan yapıyoruz,

Hiçbir zaman gerçek olmadığını, ancak yalanın gerçekten de sessizliğin çocuğu olduğunu anladım.