Canals Quotes - Page 6

• The things of this world reveal their essential absurdity when they are put in the Venetian context. In the unreal realm of the canals, as in a Swiftian Lilliput, the real world, with its contrivances, appears as a vast folly.

  Mary McCarthy

  Real, Venice, Essentials

  Mary McCarthy (1956). “Venice observed”

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• Water. Its sunny track in the plain; its splashing in the garden canal, the sound it makes when in its course it meets the mane ofthe grass; the diluted reflection of the sky together with the fleeting sight of the reeds; the Negresses fill their dripping gourds and their red clay containers; the song of the washerwomen; the gorged fields the tall crops ripening.

  Jacques Roumain

  Song, Nature, Garden

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• Remember, the political idea being expressed a year ago was that because the GOP interpreted its 1994 mandate as a call to budget-balancing austerity, the electorate would never give the White House to the GOP if its nominee was also a root-canal austerian.

  Jude Wanniski

  Years, Ideas, Roots

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• So we took out those 3 root canals when she had 3-6 months to live. And that was 6 years ago, and she is still alive today, and MRI can't find the tumour anymore. It went away.

  Hal Huggins

  Cancer, Roots, Years

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• I went to New York to be born again. And when the train plunged into a tunnel under New York City, with its lining of pipes and wires, I was out of the womb and into the birth canal.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  New York, Tunnels, Cities

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• Marriage. It's a hard term to define. Especially for me--I've ducked it like root canal. Still there's no denying the fact that marriage ranks right up there with birth and death as one of the three biggies in the human safari. It's the only one though that we'll celebrate with a conscious awareness. Very few of you remember your arrival and even fewer of you will attend your own funeral.

  Andrew Schneider

  Roots, Funeral, Biggie

  "Fictional character: Chris Stevens". "Northern Exposure/ Our Wedding", www.imdb.com. 1992.

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• How would you describe the difference between modern war and modern industry-between say, bombing and strip mining, or between chemical warfare and chemical manufacturing? The difference seems to be only that in war the victimization of humans is directly intentional and in industry it is "accepted" as a "trade-off." Were the catastrophes of Love Canal, Bhopal, Chernobyl, and the Exxon Valdez episodes of war or of peace? They were in fact, peacetime acts of aggression, intentional to the extent that the risks were known and ignored.

  Wendell Berry

  War, Differences, Risk

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• He took a bite, swallowed. "God. If asparagus tasted like that all the time, I'd be vegetarian, too." Some people in a lacquered wooden boat approached us on the canal below. One of them, a woman with curly blond hair, maybe thirty, drank from a beer then raised her glass towards us and shouted something. "We don't speak Dutch," Gus shouted back. One of the others shouted a translation: "The beautiful couple is beautiful.

  John Green

  Beautiful, Couple, Beer

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• I hate dentists. That's why my tooth fell out. I was in the middle of a root canal and wouldn't go back, so it just dropped out when I was in the middle of Fifth Avenue. I had to do the Calvin Klein show without the tooth.

  Kate Moss

  Hate, Roots, Teeth

  Interview with Glenn O’Brien, www.interviewmagazine.com. November 25, 2008.

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• Some of the environmental lobbyists of the western nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists. They have never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they would be crying out for tractors, and fertilizer, and irrigation canals, and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things.

  Norman Borlaug

  Home, Years, Office

  Interview with Gregg Easterbrook, The Atlantic Monthly, January 1997.

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