We take everything it does too personally.
— Lily
The green blade rises.
— “Now the Green Blade Rises”
She was later found dead, floating in the sea.
— Christopher Drew and Jad Mouawad, “Breaking Proud Tradition, Captains Flee and Let Others Go Down With Ship,” The New York Times
I understand you’re a neurosurgeon.
— Dr. Peter Flynn, Rushmore
May I inquire discreetly?
— The Beatles, “Lovely Rita”
It doesn’t make sense to incorporate that unless it really happened.
— AnneMarie Luijendijk
It’s ketchup.
— Lily
One of our main sources of papyri are ancient trash heaps.
— AnneMarie Luijendijk
Of course.
— Akshay
Is it in the head or between your sides?
— Andrew Bird, “Dark Matter”
Imagine that this wall is not something below you but … behind you. You aren’t lying down anymore; you simply have your back pressed against something.
— Adam Frank, “How To Fall Forever Into The Night Sky,” All Things Considered, NPR
Bug is bug.
— Lily
But, Sir, with respect, she’s a vastly heavier ship. She’s out of our class. She could be halfway to Cape Horn by the time we’re repaired and under way.
— Sailing Master John Allen, Master and Commander
The basic particle of light, a photon, is born traveling at the speed of light, as it emerges from an atom or a molecule. A photon never knows any other speed, and we have not found another phenomenon that accelerates from zero to top speed instantaneously.
— Neil deGrasse Tyson, “Hiding in the Light,” Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey
By acting like a man in love, he became a man in love again.
— Le mari, “Bastille," Paris, je t'aime
Benjamin is trying to tell us, in his report from the heart of the revolution, that commodities in their profusion and artful presentation can be valued as something other than commodities.
— Dean MacCannel, “The Tourist in the Urban Symbolic,” The Ethics of Sightseeing
I think that’s a fair assessment.
— Donald Rumsfeld, The Unknown Known
And my last stroke, and I’m heading into the grave, I wonder what color it will be?
— George W. Bush, “An Ex-President, Brush in Hand, Captures His Fellow Leaders,” The New York Times
Negative progress, figuring out that what we think doesn’t really work, and that is progress of a kind.
— Martha Himmelfarb
A few feet away from us, 27 people had died.
— Mara Gordon, “Broken, Not Bound, by an Intimate Tie,” The New York Times