Tim Robinson Quotes

You'd think that it would make them all the more credible to be free of any obvious agenda or emotional bias, motivated only by objective logic. But there's something off-putting about these hyperrational types; they're immune to any appeals to common sense or humor, the for fuck's sake defense. [...] As Kim Stanley Robinson writes, "An excess of reason is in itself a form of madness".

Thinking now of the luminous cleanliness and bell-like resonance of Aran’s limestone rock sheets, their parallel fissures pointing one to the edge of clear-cut cliffs, and the solace on a summer’s day of its spring wells that image the perfection of the wildflowers attendant on them, I realize what a difficult terrain is south Connemara: multidirectional from every point, so complex in form it verges on the formless, disputing every step with stony irregularities, leachlike softness of bog or bootlace-catching twiggy heath. Often when visitors ask me what they should see in this region I am at a loss. A curious hole in the ground? The memory of an old song about a drowning? Ultimately I have to tell them that this is a land without shortcuts.

You’d think that it would make them all the more credible to be free of any obvious agenda or emotional bias, motivated only by objective logic. But there’s something off-putting about these hyperrational types; they’re immune to any appeals to common sense or humor, the “for fuck’s sake” defense. (Think of hard-core libertarians carefully explaining to you why the fire department should be privatized or heroin should be legal or everyone should be allowed to have automatic weapons.) As Kim Stanley Robinson writes, “An excess of reason is in itself a form of madness.

as a plea that the Church of England might be a true church of Christ, notwithstanding all her corruptions, Robinson says, “It is true that the apostles mentioned them, but always with utter dislike, severe reproof, and strict charges to reform them. Rom. 16:17; 1 Cor. 5; 1 Thess. 5:14; 2 Thess. 3:6; 1 Tim. 6:5; Rev. 2:14-16, 20. But how doth this concern you? Though Paul and all the apostles with him; yea, though Christ Himself from heaven should admonish any of your churches to put away any person, though never so heretical or flagitious, you could not do it.” [Robinson,

Five goalkeepers have scored in the Premier League. They are Peter Schmeichel, Brad Friedel, Paul Robinson, Tim Howard and Asmir Begovic.

As they passed into the woods, he took one last look behind, then checked the two pistols in his belt, and hurried down the path to freedom and ultimate redemption.

(Regarding author Kim Stanley Robinson) In an era filled with complacent dystopias and escapist apocalypses, Robinson is one of our best, bravest, most moral, and most hopeful storytellers. It’s no coincidence that so many of his novels have as their set pieces long, punishing treks through unforgiving country with diminishing provisions, his characters exhausted and despondent but forcing themselves to slog on. What he’s telling us over and over, like the voice of the Third Wind whispering when all seems lost, is that it’s not too late, don’t get scared, don’t give up, we’re almost there, we can do this, we just have to keep going.

But what is love? Is it measurable or quantifiable in any way? And must it be justifiable? Or even rational? And must love come from the heart? Or must it come only from the heart, as many have put forth over the course of time, that love is strictly a denizen of the heart? And how do we know if it is our heart or our head that speaks to us? Or is it simply something you talk yourself into? And why would a girl do such a thing? Because she feels like she ought to,

These endless ankle-twisting contradictions underfoot, amorphous, resistant, cutting, dull, become the uncountable futilities heaped upon one’s own shores by the surrounding ocean of indifference. If then one could elevate gloom into metaphysical despair, see the human race as no taller than that most depressing of life-forms, the lichen that stains so many of these bare stones black, one might, paradoxically, march on with a weightier stride that would soon outwalk the linear desert. Instead, the interminable dump of broken bits and pieces one is toiling along stubbornly remains the merely personal accumulation of petty worries, selfish anxieties, broken promises, discarded aspirations and other chips off a life-worn ego, that constitutes the path to one’s own particular version of nowhere.

Jizz. Like cumshot? You can say that because you said we can say whatever the hell we want.

Each turn leads to another; without the one, the second is impossible. 

One of the best accounts of the principles and practices involved is Tim Brown’s Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation.

The Serrana Bank, a formation of shoals and low cays 250 miles out in the western Caribbean off the northeast coast of Nicaragua, is named after its own castaway. Pedro Serrano was shipwrecked there in the first half of the sixteenth century — the date is uncertain — and his survival story is so extreme as to beggar belief. He maintained that he lived for seven years on an island that had no fresh water.

Theories of flow must consider sinks as well as sources. There are locations - by definition they are not places, though we know too well where they are - that swallow up difference, leaving a desert of toxic sameness, an atmosphere of depleted possibilities of meaning, a dull residue of differences that make no difference. Our civilization produces them; it even needs them. We need them in Connemara - I am no purist in this - but must not allow them to drain away its essences. That should be the principle at the core of arguments around particular cases. And if the web of associations I have spun around these quaint landmarks in Garomna should lap out beyond the vague confines of Connemara to envelop more and more of the world, it might bring with it the suggestion of a way of looking at places as sources of difference; and surely taking note of the particularities of a place is the first step in taking care of it.

Many popular eighteenth-century iced cream flavors are familiar to modern palates--- pistachio, chocolate, strawberry, etc. Yet Georgian confectioners were great innovators and experimented with iced creams flavored with everything from Parmesan to artichoke, molding their confections into the shape of candles, lobsters, pineapples, and all manner of other conceits. Often iced creams were eaten in carriages drawn up outside of confectionery shops, enabling men and women to mingle freely in public, in a way that was otherwise prohibited. Ice cream, it seems, was a feminist enterprise! Books that give a good overview of Georgian ice cream and confectionary include Of Sugar and Snow: A History of Ice Cream Making by Jeri Quinzio (University of California Press, 2009); Sugar-plums and Sherbet: The Prehistory of Sweets by Laura Mason (Prospect Books, 1998); and Sweets: A History of Temptation by Tim Richardson (Bantam Books, 2002).

Keiller finds extinction looming everywhere – species dying off at a far faster rate than scientists had thought possible only a few years ago. The emphasis on extinction means that the concerns of Robinson in Ruins rhyme with the preoccupations that have emerged in speculative realist philosophy, which has focused on the spaces prior to, beyond and after human life. In some respects, the work of philosophers such as Ray Brassier and Tim Morton re-stages the old confrontation between human finitude and the sublime which was the former subject of a certain kind of landscape art. But where the older sublime concentrated on local natural phenomenon such as the ocean or volcanic eruptions which could overwhelm and destroy the individual organism or whole cities, speculative realism contemplates the extinction, not only of the human world, but of life and indeed matter itself. The prospect of ecological catastrophe means that disjunction between the lived time of human experience and longer durations is now not just a question of metaphysical contemplation, but a matter of urgent political concern, as one of Robinson’s touchstones, Fredric Jameson, noted. ‘[A]s organisms of a particular life span,’ Jameson writes in his essay ‘Actually Existing Marxism’, we are poorly placed as biological individuals to witness the more fundamental dynamics of history, glimpsing this or that incomplete moment, which we hasten to translate into the alltoo-human terms of success or failure. But neither stoic wisdom nor the reminder of a longer-term view are really satisfactory responses to this peculiar existential and epistemological dilemma, comparable to the science-fictional one of beings inhabiting a cosmos they do not have organs to perceive or identify. Perhaps only the acknowledgement of this radical incommensurability between human existence and the dynamic of collective history and production is capable of generating new kinds of political attitudes; new kinds of political perception, as well as of political patience; and new methods for decoding the age as well, and reading the imperceptible tremors within it of an inconceivable future. Amongst its requiem for neoliberal England, Robinson in Ruins gives us some intimations of those imperceptible tremors and inconceivable futures.

. Keiller finds extinction looming everywhere – species dying off at a far faster rate than scientists had thought possible only a few years ago. The emphasis on extinction means that the concerns of Robinson in Ruins rhyme with the preoccupations that have emerged in speculative realist philosophy, which has focused on the spaces prior to, beyond and after human life. In some respects, the work of philosophers such as Ray Brassier and Tim Morton re-stages the old confrontation between human finitude and the sublime which was the former subject of a certain kind of landscape art. But where the older sublime concentrated on local natural phenomenon such as the ocean or volcanic eruptions which could overwhelm and destroy the individual organism or whole cities, speculative realism contemplates the extinction, not only of the human world, but of life and indeed matter itself. The prospect of ecological catastrophe means that disjunction between the lived time of human experience and longer durations is now not just a question of metaphysical contemplation, but a matter of urgent political concern, as one of Robinson’s touchstones, Fredric Jameson, noted. ‘[A]s organisms of a particular life span,’ Jameson writes in his essay ‘Actually Existing Marxism’, we are poorly placed as biological individuals to witness the more fundamental dynamics of history, glimpsing this or that incomplete moment, which we hasten to translate into the alltoo-human terms of success or failure. But neither stoic wisdom nor the reminder of a longer-term view are really satisfactory responses to this peculiar existential and epistemological dilemma, comparable to the science-fictional one of beings inhabiting a cosmos they do not have organs to perceive or identify. Perhaps only the acknowledgement of this radical incommensurability between human existence and the dynamic of collective history and production is capable of generating new kinds of political attitudes; new kinds of political perception, as well as of political patience; and new methods for decoding the age as well, and reading the imperceptible tremors within it of an inconceivable future. (Valences of the Dialectic, Verso, 2010, pp369-70) Amongst its requiem for neoliberal England, Robinson in Ruins gives us some intimations of those imperceptible tremors and inconceivable futures.