Ultraviolet Book Quotes

We are all burnt by ultraviolet rays. We all contain water in about the same ratio as Earth does, and salt water in the same ratio that the oceans do. We are poems about the hyperobject Earth.

Evolution writ large is the belief that a cloud of hydrogen will spontaneously invent extreme-ultraviolet lithography, perform Swan Lake, and write all the books in the British Museum.

She’s ultra conservative, while I am ultraviolet. I would show, but I’m beyond what anybody can see. I made her look like Helen Keller, with a wig and makeup, and I also made her look like Helen Keller in that she could look but she could not see.

Bumblebees detect the polarization of sunlight, invisible to uninstrumented humans; put vipers sense infrared radiation and detect temperature differences of 0.01C at a distance of half a meter; many insects can see ultraviolet light; some African freshwater fish generate a static electric field around themselves and sense intruders by slight perturbations induced in the field; dogs, sharks, and cicadas detect sounds wholly inaudible to humans; ordinary scorpions have micro--seismometers on their legs so they can detect in darkness the footsteps of a small insect a meter away; water scorpions sense their depth by measuring the hydrostatic pressure; a nubile female silkworm moth releases ten billionths of a gram of sex attractant per second, and draws to her every male for miles around; dolphins, whales, and bats use a kind of sonar for precision echo-location. The direction, range, and amplitude of sounds reflected by to echo-locating bats are systematically mapped onto adjacent areas of the bat brain. How does the bat perceive its echo-world? Carp and catfish have taste buds distributed over most of their bodies, as well as in their mouths; the nerves from all these sensors converge on massive sensory processing lobes in the brain, lobes unknown in other animals. how does a catfish view the world? What does it feel like to be inside its brain? There are reported cases in which a dog wags its tail and greets with joy a man it has never met before; he turns out to be the long-lost identical twin of the dog's "master", recognizable by his odor. What is the smell-world of a dog like? Magnetotactic bacteria contain within them tiny crystals of magnetite - an iron mineral known to early sailing ship navigators as lodenstone. The bacteria literally have internal compasses that align them along the Earth's magnetic field. The great churning dynamo of molten iron in the Earth's core - as far as we know, entirely unknown to uninstrumented humans - is a guiding reality for these microscopic beings. How does the Earth's magnetism feel to them? All these creatures may be automatons, or nearly so, but what astounding special powers they have, never granted to humans, or even to comic book superheroes. How different their view of the world must be, perceiving so much that we miss.

place; it’s a mind-set. A strange coincidence: for my project on roots, I was reading a staggering book from 1980 called Le Corps noir (The Black Body) by a Haitian writer named Jean-Claude Charles. He coined the term enracinerrance, a French neologism that fuses the idea of rootedness and wandering. He spent his life between Haiti, New York, and Paris, very comfortably rooted in his nomadism. The first line of one of his experimental chapters is this: “il était une fois john howard griffin mansfield texas” (“once upon a time there was john howard griffin in mansfield texas”). I was stunned to find the small town that shares a border with my hometown in the pages of this Haitian author’s book published in France. What in the world was Mansfield, Texas, doing in this book I’d found by chance while researching roots for a totally unrelated academic project? The white man named John Howard Griffin referred to by Charles had conducted an experiment back in the late 1950s in which he disguised himself as a black man in order to understand what it must feel like to be black in the South. He darkened his skin with an ultraviolet lamp and skin-darkening medication and then took to the road, confirming the daily abuses in the South toward people with more melanin in their skin. His experiences were compiled in the classic Black Like Me (1962), which was later made into a film. When the book came out, Griffin and his family in Mansfield received death threats. It is astounding that I found out about this experiment, which began one town over from mine, through a gleefully nomadic Haitian who slipped it into his pain-filled essay about the black body. If you don’t return to your roots, they come and find you.

She was faint by passing the terrible things art has done countless times over, why believe in put down theories and books her eyes constantly told me without lower lengths of ultraviolet new beams pouring from an endless waterfall toward the center of every center. I've emerged my skin in years of Roman romance only to find cosmic rays from a different perspective and on that note perception expanded all the truthful parts of myself. I was merely deadly alone in a sunlit gaze trying to hold my organs inside long enough to finish the next book, to wrap the defensive cloak of life before the moon rose from the red sea eons ago, casting the net of creation where no man has ever been.

She was faint by passing the terrible things art has done countless times over, why believe in put down theories and books her eyes constantly told me without lower lengths of ultraviolet new beams pouring from an endless waterfall toward the center of every center. I've emerged my skin in years of Roman romance only to find cosmic rays from a different perspective and on that note perception expanded all the truthful parts of myself. I was merely deadly alone in a sunlit gaze trying to hold my organs inside long enough to finish the next book, to wrap the defensive cloak of life before the moon rose from the red sea eons ago, casting the net of creation where no man has ever been.

The world she lives in is not mine. Life is faster for her; time runs slower. Her eyes can follow the wingbeats of a bee as easily as ours follow the wingbeats of a bird. What is she seeing? I wonder, and my brain does flipflops trying to imagine it, because I can't.I have three different receptor-sensitivities in my eyes: red, green and blue. Hawks, like other birds have four. This hawk can see colours I cannot, right into the ultra-violet spectrum. She can see polarised light, too, watch thermals of warm air rise, roil, and spill into clouds, and trace, too, the magnetic lines of force that stretch across the earth. The light falling into her deep black pupils is registered with such frightening precision that she can see with fierce clarity things I can't possibly resolve from the generalised blur. The claws on the toes of the house martins overhead. The veins on the wings of the white butterfly hunting its wavering course over the mustards at the end of the garden. I'm standing there, my sorry human eyes overwhelmed by light and detail, while the hawk watches everything with the greedy intensity of a child filling in a colouring book, scribbling joyously, blocking in colour, making the pages its own.

As animals died, the plains were scattered with the torn carcasses left by carrion feeders. Quickly, the skeletons, bleached and burned by ultraviolet light, once again became part of the whirling waltz of ecology. This was one of the great insights of ancient Greece: the world’s energy as Heraclitean fire, part of a closed system, from sky to stones, from grass to flesh, from flesh to earth, under the watchful eye of the sun that offered its photons to the nitrogen cycle. The Bardo Thodol—the Tibetan Book of the Dead—offers a similar theory to that of Heraclitus and the philosophers of flux. Everything passes, everything flows, the wild donkeys run, the wolves hunt, the vultures hover: order, equilibrium, under the sun. A crushing silence. An unforgiving light, few men. A dream.

Somewhere in that lake are the drops of water that, over the next several months, will travel down miles of tubes, get sprayed with chlorine, zapped with ultraviolet light, and eventually climb the pipes of Joe Coffee’s sink and land in my cup.

To keep our water safe from microorganisms, Kirsten and her colleagues use several weapons, including ultraviolet rays and chlorine. Yes, my hippie aunt may consider this a government conspiracy, but I’m with the CDC, which said the addition of chlorine to drinking water is one of the ten great health achievements of the twentieth century.

for Ceres, like all readers, was altered by every book she read, and so her life became a record of their consumption. Were an ultraviolet light to be shone on her in a darkened room, their titles might have been written on her skin, so many as to be as tangled and intertwined

The world she lives in is not mine. Life is faster for her; time runs slower. Her eyes can follow the wingbeats of a bee as easily as ours follow the wingbeats of a bird. What is she seeing? I wonder, and my brain does backflips trying to imagine it, because I can’t. I have three different receptor-sensitivities in my eyes: red, green and blue. Hawks, like other birds, have four. This hawk can see colours I cannot, right into the ultraviolet spectrum. She can see polarised light, too, watch thermals of warm air rise, roil, and spill into clouds, and trace, too, the magnetic lines of force that stretch across the earth. The light falling into her deep black pupils is registered with such frightening precision that she can see with fierce clarity things I can’t possibly resolve from the generalised blur. The claws on the toes of the house martins overhead. The veins on the wings of the white butterfly hunting its wavering course over the mustards at the end of the garden. I’m standing there, my sorry human eyes overwhelmed by light and detail, while the hawk watches everything with the greedy intensity of a child filling in a colouring book, scribbling joyously, blocking in colour, making the pages its own. And all I can think is, I want to go back inside.