Northern Exposure Quotes

It was like the first time I visited Versailles. There was an eerieness, like I'd been there before. I don't know if I was Louis XIV or Marie Antoinette or a lowly groundskeeper, but I lived there.

It's not the thing you fling, it's the fling itself.

I have a print - you can buy them at the Victoria and Albert Museum - of a photograph of the village street of Thetford, taken in 1868, in which William Smith is not. The street is empty. There is a grocer's shop and a blacksmith's and a stationary cart and a great spreading tree, but not a single human figure. In fact William Smith - or someone, or several people, dogs too, geese, a man on a horse - passed beneath the tree, went into the grocer's shop, loitered for a moment talking to a friend while the photograph was taken but he is invisible, all of them are invisible. The exposure of the photograph - sixty minutes - was so long that William Smith and everyone else passed through it and away leaving no trace. Not even so much of a mark as those primordial worms that passed through the Cambrian mud of northern Scotland and left the empty tube of their passage in the rock. I like that. I like that very much. A neat image for the relation of man to the physical world. Gone, passed through and away.

Art is more like real estate than stocks. Some Warhols are like studio apartments in midblock buildings with northern exposures, while other Warhols are penthouse properties with 360-degree views. A share of Cisco, however, is always just a share of Cisco.” Judging

Both Lear and Washington held fast to paternalistic assumptions about African slavery, believing that enslaved men and women were better off with a generous owner than emancipated and living independent lives. Decades later, Southerners would justify the institution of slavery with descriptions of the supposed benefits that came with enslavement. According to many Southerners, slaves were better cared for, better fed, sheltered, and treated almost as though they were members of the family. Northern emancipation left thousands of ex-slaves without assistance, and Southerners charged that free blacks were living and dying in the cold alleyways of the urban North. Many believed Northern freedom to be a far less humane existence, one that left black men and women to die in the streets from exposure and starvation. But

I don’t seem to have said enough about the compensating or positive element of exposure to travel. Just as you discover that stupidity and cruelty are the same everywhere, you find that the essential elements of humanism are the same everywhere, too. Punjabis in Amritsar and Lahore are equally welcoming and open-minded, even though partition means the amputation of Punjab as well as of the subcontinent. There are a heartening number of atheists and agnostics in the six counties of Northern Ireland, even though Ulster as well as Ireland has been divided. Most important of all, the instinct for justice and for liberty is just as much “innate” in us as are the promptings of tribalism and sexual xenophobia and superstition. People know when they are being lied to, they know when their rulers are absurd, they know they do not love their chains; every time a Bastille falls one is always pleasantly surprised by how many sane and decent people were there all along. There’s an old argument about whether full bellies or empty bellies lead to contentment or revolt: it’s an argument not worth having. The crucial organ is the mind, not the gut. People assert themselves out of an unquenchable sense of dignity.

Q. How can I be certain that what I fear will happen will never really happen? A. Sadly, the answer is you can't be certain! If you suffer from OCD you probably want a 100 percent guarantee that you will never do anything dangerous or that no harm will ever come to you or your family members. Unfortunately, life does not work like this. If I think about it, I know that there is no guarantee that I won't be hit by a car coming home from work today - but somehow my brain automatically accepts the very small chance of this happening and so permits me to go on living my life. More than two thousand years ago the Buddha (a great psychologist besides being a religious teacher) warned that one of the key things that makes us suffer is that we always want more than we will actually get - whether what we want is material like gold and jewels, or (my addition) in the case of OCD, more certainty than you will ever achieve. Thus the solution the Buddha might have offered you in northern India those thousands of years ago might have been something like this: "To stop suffering you must learn to accept that you will never achieve as much certainty as you want, no matter how much you pursue it; so it is up to you to choose: Either accept this truth and live your life happily, or fight against this truth and continue to suffer." Let me say it again for emphasis: you will never be certain that you won't act on the urges you have, or that the terrible things you fear will happen will not actually happen - but I can assure you that the odds of these things actually happening are small enough that it is not worth wasting your life trying (in vain) to get 100 percent certainty. Better to trust in yourself, your religious beliefs, or in evolution having prepared us well for surviving in this world. If evidence from brain studies better helps to convince you this is true, brain imaging studies of OCD sufferers now suggest that there really is something wrong with their "certainty system"; whatever automatically lets someone without OCD feel that things are OK does not function correctly in the OCD sufferer's brain (who then tries to convince himself that everything is OK, eventually becoming tired and frustrated when he cannot use other brain functions to achieve 100 percent certainty).

General R. E. Lee, Commanding Army of Northern Virginia: Yours of the 8th instant has been received. I am glad to find that you concur so entirely with me as to the want of our country in this trying hour, and am happy to add that after the first depression consequent upon our disasters in the West, indications have appeared that our people will exhibit that fortitude which we agree in believing is alone needful to secure ultimate success. It well became Sidney Johnston, when overwhelmed by a senseless clamor, to admit the rule that success is the test of merit, and yet there has been nothing which I have found to require a greater effort of patience than to bear the criticisms of the ignorant, who pronounce everything a failure which does not equal their expectations or desires, and can see no good result which is not in the line of their own imaginings. I admit the propriety of your conclusions, that an officer who loses the confidence of his troops should have his position changed, whatever may be his ability; but when I read the sentence I was not at all prepared for the application you were about to make. Expressions of discontent in the public journals furnish but little evidence of the sentiment of an army.… But suppose, my dear friend, that I were to admit, with all their implications, the points which you present, where am I to find that new commander who is to possess the greater ability which you believe to be required? I do not doubt the readiness with which you would give way to one who could accomplish all that you have wished, and you will do me the justice to believe that if Providence should kindly offer such a person for our use, I would not hesitate to avail of his services. My sight is not sufficiently penetrating to discover such hidden merit, if it exists, and I have but used to you the language of sober earnestness when I have impressed upon you the propriety of avoiding all unnecessary exposure to danger, because I felt our country could not bear to lose you. To ask me to substitute you by someone in my judgment more fit to command, or who would possess more of the confidence of the army or of the reflecting men in the country, is to demand of me an impossibility. It only remains for me to hope that you will take all possible care of yourself, that your health and strength may be entirely restored, and that the Lord will preserve you for the important duties devolved upon you in the struggle of our suffering country for the independence which we have engaged in war to maintain. As ever, very respectfully and truly yours, JEFFERSON DAVIS

signs of trouble in any of the monitored rooms on

When Mrs. Kondo spoke to me in 1989, her daughter was forty-five years old and living far away on Hokkaido in northern Japan. The younger woman suffered the classic symptoms of fetal exposure: microcephaly and mental retardation. With her mother’s constant support, she had finished basic schooling, had married, and had borne two children of her own. The children showed no symptoms of abnormality; as in so many other cases, there was no evidence of a genetic effect. But Mrs. Kondo’s daughter cannot function as a normal mother in her state of limited mental capability. So she relates to her children much as a sister, and others bear the responsibility of parenthood.

Also, as a general rule of thumb you should try to organize your plants within the grids so that tall plants will not overshadow shorter ones. Where feasible, this will mean that your vertical trellis plants and tall species, such as tomatoes, are best placed on the northern side of the box, with intermediate plants occupying the center grids and smaller plants toward the front, facing south. (The rules are, of course, different in the Southern Hemisphere, where the north side gets the most sun exposure.)

Indisputably, Margaret Thatcher had a jaundiced view of the Irish. Perhaps Peter Mandelson’s vignette about meeting her soon after he was appointed Northern Ireland Secretary in 1999 sheds some light: She came up to me and she said, ‘I’ve got one thing to say to you, my boy.’ She said, ‘You can’t trust the Irish, they’re all liars. Liars, and that’s what you have to remember, so just don’t forget it.’ With that she waltzed off and that was my only personal exposure to her.

All told, armed vigilantes ushered more than 200 Chinese to the Northern Pacific Railroad depot, where they boarded the southbound train the following morning. Two Chinese died from exposure during the night. Later, the small “Chinatown” on Tacoma's waterfront mysteriously burned.