|
Quotes
Gastronomic"People ask me: Why do you write about food, and eating and drinking? Why don't you write about the struggle for power and security, and about love, the way others do? They ask it accusingly, as if I were somehow gross, unfaithful to the honor of my craft. The easiest answer is to say that, like most humans, I am hungry. But there is more than that. It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it." — M. F. K. Fisher, The Gastronomical Me (1943) "Beef and/or pork and/or mechanically deboned chicken." — The main ingredient and/or ingredients in a package of hot dogs at Steinberg's Supermarket, Montréal (1981) "Blanc... Blond... Bruni... Clarifié... Cru (fermier)... Demi-sel... Doux... Fondu... Frais... Maitre d'Hotel... Manié... Meunière... Nantais... Noir... Noisette... Pasteurisé... Roux... Salé..." — Types of butter, not including compound butters such as beurre Bercy or beurre d'anchois, described in L'ABC de la Gastronomie Francaise (1988) "Layer of ash separates morning and evening milk." — Label on Morbier, a semi-soft French cheese made from two layers of cow's milk separated by a thin layer of vegetable ash (c. 1990) "Nous avons du couscous. Et aussi, du couscous. Et bien, du couscous. Qu'est ce que vous voulez, monsieur?" — The owner of a small Algerian restaurant in Paris, when asked what was available for dinner (1991) "Gimme a shrooms whiz without." — The right way to order a cheesesteak sandwich with mushrooms and Cheez Whiz but without grilled onions at Pat's, Philadelphia (1993) "A better tasting glass of water." and "When leaving the diner please do not leave your car on our parking lot." — Among the musings sprinkled throughout the menu of the Melrose Diner, Philadelphia (1993) "L'Ile Ngabe ..... Red Snapple with tomatoes and onions ..... $16.95" — Among the dishes on the menu of Chez Madeleine, New York (1995) "Special ..... Sleeping bus to Canton ..... Only 80Y" — Among the breakfast items on the menu of Lisa's Cafe, Yangshuo, Guangxi Province, China (1995) "The food was quite horrible, but I discovered a long time ago that you can eat almost anything if you take a sip of Coke in between bites." — Sean Condon, Drive Thru America (1998) "Plantain coriander, seven, doesn't have to be." — Eve Shopsin calling out an order for a ripe plantain and cilantro soup that's a 7 on a spiciness scale from 1 to 10 ("where six is hotter than most people like it") and that doesn't need to be vegetarian, at Shopsin's, New York (1999) "It can get pretty irritating with some of these customers. [...] They'll say, give me a nice whitefish. So I'll say, one whitefish coming right up. Cheerful, pleasant. And they'll say, a nice whitefish. Can you imagine? This happens every Sunday at least once. [...] Of course, I could just repeat after them exactly, a nice whitefish, but I won't. I won't give them the satisfaction." — Russ & Daughters counterman in Tepper Isn't Going Out by Calvin Trillin (2001) "Unlimited buffet of crudity ..... 10€" — Among the salad items on the English menu at L'Auberge du Marin, Martinique (2007) "Which hunger is this bounty of comida appeasing, I wonder: a hunger in the belly or in the imagination? And in the case of recent immigrants like us, are these the same things?" — Junot Díaz, "He'll Take El Alto," Gourmet Magazine (2007) "A'u Ku caught by Kelly Malakai on the 'Kaimi'", "Deep-water Ahi caught aboard the fishing vessel 'Pacific Reflection'", "Uku caught by Harry Furomoto off the backside of Haleakala", "Mahimahi caught by Chris Suzuki in blue waters beyond Lanai", and "Moi from leeward Oahu fish farms in the tradition of old Hawaii." — Pushing the limits of provenance specificity on the menu of Mama's Fish House, Maui (2008) "So what don't you want?... I been working here for 44 years. Ain't no one ever ordered nothing but T-bone steak and a baked potato. Except this one asshole from New York tried to order trout back in 1987. We don't sell no goddamn trout. T-Bone steaks. So either you don't want the corn on the cob or you don't want the green beans. So what don't you want?" — Waitress at the T-Bone Cafe, Coleman, Texas, in "Hell or High Water" (2016)
Escapist"Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off — then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can." — Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851) "As for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts." — Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851) "Every now and then when your life gets complicated and the weasels start closing in, the only real cure is to load up on heinous chemicals and then drive like a bastard from Hollywood to Las Vegas. To relax, as it were, in the womb of the desert sun. Just roll the roof back and screw it on, grease the face with white tanning butter and move out with the music at top volume, and at least a pint of ether." — Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971) [... and a geeky parody]
Maritime"There are three sorts of people: those who are alive, those who are dead, and those who are at sea." — Aristotle "Yes, as everyone knows, meditation and water are wedded forever." — Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851) "Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing—absolutely nothing—half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats." — Kenneth Grahame, "The Wind in the Willows" (1908) "The cure for anything is salt water — sweat, tears, or the sea." — Isak Dinesen (1934) "If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea." — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900-1944) "I really don't know why it is that all of us are so committed to the sea, except I think it is because in addition to the fact that the sea changes and the light changes, and ships change, it is because we all came from the sea. And it is an interesting biological fact that all of us have in our veins the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean, and, therefore, we have salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears. We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea, whether it is to sail or to watch it we are going back from whence we came." — John F. Kennedy (1962) "If a man must be obsessed by something, I suppose a boat is as good as anything, perhaps better than most. A small sailing craft is not only beautiful, it is seductive and full of strange promise and the hint of trouble." — E. B. White, The Sea and the Wind that Blows (1963) "In the service of the sea, luck is a very real personal attribute." — Roland Huntford, The Last Place on Earth (1979) "Nor was this sloop of mine purely an engineer's conceit. She was born of song and sculpture, too. I could hear it in the hum of her rigging. I could see it in the flare of her hull. She owed a debt to the epics of Homer and the fugues of Bach. She was an eloquent fusion of the war within ourselves, the war which tears us apart, the ceaseless conflict between science and art." — Richard Bode, First You Have to Row a Little Boat (1993)
Cinematic"Leave the gun. Take the cannoli." — Clemenza, just after executing Paulie in The Godfather (1972) "Saigon. Shit. I'm still only in Saigon. Every time I think I'm gonna wake up back in the jungle. When I was home after my first tour it was worse. I'd wake up and there'd be nothing. I hardly said a word to my wife until I said yes to a divorce. When I was here, I wanted to be there. When I was there all I could think of was getting back into the jungle. Been here a week now, waiting for a mission, getting softer. Every minute I stay in this room, I get weaker, and every minute Charlie squats in the bush, he gets stronger. Each time I look around the walls move in a littler tighter... [Fade in to the Doors doing "The End"] Everyone gets everything he wants. I wanted a mission, and for my sins they gave me one. Brought it up to me like room service. It was a real choice mission, and when it was over, I'd never want another. I was going to the worst place in the world and I didn't even know it yet. Weeks away and hundreds of miles up a river that snaked through the war like a main circuit cable — plugged straight into Kurtz." — Captain Willard, opening narration in Apocalypse Now (1979) [... and a geeky parody] "Captain, I don't know how you feel about this shrimp, but if you'll eat it you won't have to prove your courage in any other way." — General Corman to Captain Willard, Apocalypse Now (1979) "No. Try not. Do, or do not. There is no try." — Yoda in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (1980) "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die." — Roy Batty in Blade Runner (1982) [... and a geeky parody] "True love is the greatest thing in the world. Except for a nice MLT... a mutton, lettuce and tomato sandwich when the mutton is nice and lean, and the tomato is ripe.... they're so perky. I love that." — Miracle Max in Princess Bride (1987) "Baseball is a simple game. You throw the ball, you hit the ball, you catch the ball. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, and sometimes it rains." — Crash Davis in Bull Durham (1988) "I thought we agreed never to discuss the horrors we endured in the killing fields of the Family Fun Center." — Dale, after a humiliating game of paintball in King of the Hill (1999) "Everybody needs money. That's why they call it money." — Bergman in Heist (2001)
Research"It often happens, with regard to new inventions, that one part of the general public finds them useless and another part considers them to be impossible. When it becomes clear that the possibility and the usefulness can no longer be denied, most agree that the whole thing was fairly easy to discover and that they knew about it all along." — Abraham Edelcrantz, A Treatise on Telegraphs (1796) "To measure is to know." — Lord Kelvin (1824-1907) "This 'telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us." — Western Union internal memo (1876) "It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has the data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts." — Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859 - 1930) "If we knew what it was we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would it?" — Albert Einstein (1941) "There was a footpath leading across the fields to New Southgate, and I used to go there alone to watch the sunset and contemplate suicide. I did not, however, commit suicide, because I wished to know more of mathematics." — Bertrand Russell, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell (1951) "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900-1944) "The test of all knowledge is experiment." — Richard Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics (1963) "Self-sustaining arguments are cheap; anyone with half a brain and a reasonable turn of phrase should be able to set forth his own prejudices. The test of a well-constructed defense lies in the identification and disproof of alternatives." — Stephen Jay Gould, Natural History (1990) "A surprising number of people still ask me: 'Why do you need all that speed?' I just want to make the network go as fast as it can go. I don't care if there are no Gigabit applications. I don't care if the operating system can't keep up. I just want it to go fast." — Tim Balraj, on his graduate work at Columbia University (1991) "It's a mathematical thing, no big deal, unless you're a physicist and then you focus on it, to the exclusion of the truth." — Someone claiming that E=mc (not squared), in This American Life (2009)
Computer Science"Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do." — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)
"I must Create a System "Any problem in computer science can be solved with another level of indirection... Except for the problem of too many layers of indirection." — David Wheeler (1927-2004) "Plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow." Fred Brooks, referring to software system implementations in The Mythical Man Month (1975) "What were the lessons I learned from so many years of intensive work on the practical problem of setting type by computer? One of the most important lessons, perhaps, is the fact that software is hard. From now on I will have a significantly greater respect for every successful software tool that I encounter. During the past decade I was surprised to learn that the writing of programs for TeX and Metafont proved to be much more difficult than all the other things I had done (like proving theorems or writing books). The creation of good software demands a significantly higher standard of accuracy than those other things do, and it requires a longer attention span than other intellectual tasks." — Donald Knuth, keynote address to the 11th IFIP World Computer Congress (1989) "... the scientist builds in order to study; the engineer studies in order to build. I submit that by any reasonable criterion the discipline we call Computer Science is in fact not a science but a synthetic, an engineering, discipline." — Fred Brooks, ACM Allen Newell Award acceptance lecture (1994) "This is not a field where one paints a painting that will be looked at for centuries. This is a field where one does one's work and in ten years it's obsolete. It's sort of like sediment of rocks. You're building up a mountain and you get to contribute your little layer of sedimentary rock to make the mountain that much higher. But no one on the surface will see your sediment. They'll stand on it, but it will only be appreciated by that rare geologist." — Steve Jobs (1955-2011) "The kind of diversity that I think really matters isn't skin shade and body shape, but different ways of thinking. Yes, it's great to have some of the people that desperately want to start writing code once they hear about a few special cases. But it's also good to have other types of people, like me, that like to think about the problem a lot, from lots of different angles, and then realize the right problem to solve and the simple, general-purpose solution that will handle all the cases." — Radia Perlman, interview in The Atlantic (2018)
Networking
"Lo, soul, seest thou not God's purpose from the first? "Transport of the mails, transport of the human voice, transport of flickering pictures — in this century as in others our highest accomplishments still have the single aim of bringing men together." — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900-1944) "A name indicates what we seek. An address indicates where it is. A route indicates how we get there." — Jon Postel, Zen in the Art of Computer Networking [actually in RFC 791, the Internet Protocol specification] (1981) "We reject kings, presidents, and voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code." — Dave Clark on the Internet Engineering Task Force (1992) "The only thing fault tolerant about the Internet is that its users are willing to tolerate its faults." — Rob Pike (c. 1995) "We now have photographic evidence that WAP sucks." — Rohit Khare on the Wireless Application Protocol (2000) "...Beanstock Coffees. Fresh Produce. Newspapers. Wireless Internet. Select Meats..." — List of goods and services at Far Land Provisions, Provincetown, Massachusetts (2004) "We think of it as technology facilitating serendipity. As to whether anyone is going to get laid from it, all I can say is that our engineers are working day and night to make this happen." — Dennis Crowley, creator of dodgeball.com, a mobile social networking application (2004)
Corporate"We trained hard... but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams we would be reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing: and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization." — Petronius (c. 60 A.D.) "No way... Life's too short to work for AT&T." — Bill Campbell, CEO of startup GO Corporation, on whether he would consider becoming CEO of a merged GO-EO company, to be owned by AT&T (1993) "People learned that the way to get ahead wasn't necessarily to have good ideas. That took too long to become apparent. The best way to get ahead was to make good presentations. People would say of comers: 'He's good with foils,' referring to the overhead transparencies that began to dominate IBM meetings. People began spending days or weeks preparing foils for routine meetings... [Foils] became such a part of the culture that senior executives began having projectors built into their beautiful rosewood desks." — Paul Carrol, Big Blues: The Unmaking of IBM (1993) "Emphasize, focus, personal responsibility, and results." — Matsushita employee slogan, evidently translated badly from the Japanese (1993) "We're getting ready to circulate a draft of the requirements." — A manager casually reporting at least two degrees of separation from running code on a software development effort already three months into a six-month release schedule. The software never shipped. (1995) "The only problem with Microsoft is that they have no taste. I don't mean that in a small way. I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don't think of original ideas and they don't bring much culture into their products. I have no problem with their success — they've earned their success for the most part. I have a problem with the fact that they just make really third-rate products." — Steve Jobs, founder of Apple and Next, CEO of Pixar (1995) "No! There are no significant bugs in our released software that any significant number of users want fixed." — Bill Gates, founder and CEO of Microsoft (1995) "Refusez le technopollution." — Sun Microsystems ad in Paris (1997) "One of the miracles of modern corporate propaganda is the way it has persuaded the world that the CEO of a publicly held corporation is by definition an intrepid risk-taker and an inspired genius when in fact he is (a) playing with other people's money, (b) assured a fortune even if he fails and (c) a guy who has spent his whole adult life wearing a suit and ingratiating himself on the men above him in the chain of command." — Michael Lewis, New York Times Magazine (August 1997) "Yes, I see in your résumé that you've been loyal to quite a few companies." — Wall Street Journal cartoon (1998) "Anyone who has quit one life for another will understand the importance of insuring that none of the people you leave behind do so well for themselves as to suggest that you have made a truly colossal mistake." — Michael Lewis, New York Times Magazine (1999) "And as it is known to veterans of all intramural politics — whether they take place on a university campus or inside a corporation — the less at stake, the more vicious the battle." — Michael Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning (1999) "You have zero privacy now. Get used to it." — Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun Microsystems, reacting to concerns that Jini fails to protect consumers from being tracked while connected to a network (1999) "Here's what I'd like you to do. Sell $1.2 million. Put $800,000 into Treasury bills and the rest into a money market fund. OK? Thanks." One side of a 30-second phone conversation heard over the cubicle walls at a telecom startup that had recently been acquired for several billion dollars (2000) "Linux is not in the public domain. Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches." — Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft (2001) "We have no obligation to make history. We have no obligation to make art. We have no obligation to make a statement. To make money is our only obligation." — Michael Eisner, CEO of Disney (2000)
New York
"Bananas ripe and green, and ginger-root, "A block or two west of the new City of Man in Turtle Bay there is an old willow tree that presides over an interior garden. It is a battered tree, long suffering and much climbed, held together by strands of wire but beloved of those who know it. In a way it symbolizes the city: life under difficulties, growth against odds, sap-rise in the midst of concrete, and the steady reaching for the sun. Whenever I look at it nowadays, and feel the cold shadow of the planes, I think: 'This must be saved, this particular thing, this very tree.' If it were to go, all would go — this city, this mischievous and marvelous monument which not to look upon would be like death." — E. B. White, Here Is New York (1949) [... and a longer excerpt] "Melting pot Harlem — Harlem of honey and chocolate and caramel and rum and vinegar and lemon and lime and gall. Dusky dream Harlem rumbling into a nightmare tunnel where the subway from the Bronx keeps right on downtown." — Langston Hughes, Freedomways (1963) "We can kick your city's ass." — Proposed motto for New York City, as read by Mayor Rudolph Giuliani on the Late Show with David Letterman (1995) "Remember how great New York was in the 70's? You could rent a huge apartment for a few hundred dollars a month, and all these bourgeois fucking people were afraid to live here." — Overheard in Central Park (1998) "You have to swipe it with attitude." — Subway attendant, explaining to a frustrated rider the proper way to slide a fare card through the magnetic reader (2000) "My niece [...] lives on Rivington Street. I don't know if that's included in what they call the East Village. We still call it the Lower East Side. You don't even want to know what she paid for her apartment. A co-op. A co-op on Rivington Street! I told her that her great-grandparents worked sixteen hours a day just to get out of Rivington Street." — Calvin Trillin, Tepper Isn't Going Out (2001) "Damn!" — Times Square moviegoer, in loud reaction to an especially racy scene in Y Tu Mamá También (2002) "Of the many odd things about New Yorkers, there is this: How is it that a people living in the world's greatest port, a city with no neighborhood that is far from a waterfront, a city whose location was chosen because of the sea, where the great cargo ships and tankers, mighty little tugs, yachts, and harbor patrol boats glide by, has lost all connection with the sea, almost forgotten that it's there?" — Mark Kurlansky, The Big Oyster (2006)
Morbid"There's no excuse. They were, after all, rocket scientists." — Edward Tufte, on the failure of Morton Thiokol engineers to make clear, in their pre-launch presentations, the link between cold weather and O-ring failure that led to the 1986 space-shuttle disaster (1997) http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/news/national/dead-kennedy.html — Reusable URL for a New York Times story on the death of Michael Kennedy, son of Robert, in a skiing accident (1998) "When war is waging, one has to think of two things before all others: in the first place of one's shoes, in the second place of food to eat; and not vice versa [...] because he who has shoes can search for food, but the inverse is not true." — Primo Levi, putting it in perspective, in La Tregua (1963)
Political"People who have read only one book can be quite dangerous." — Molly Ivins, Shrub: The Short but Happy Political Life of George W. Bush (2000) "What politics has become requires a level of tolerance for triviality and artifice and nonsense that I have found in short supply." — Al Gore (2007) "Where does the Constitution get off telling the U.S. Government what to do?" — Stephen Colbert (2008) "Talent is universal, but opportunity is not." — Nicholas Kristof, New York Times (2012) "On the day he announced his candidacy this past November, the air was heavy with oleander and snipped greenery and sea mist colliding with mold and wood polish and hotel soap and the metallic vapor of Diet Coke and the alcoholic ferment of generations of cougars in Chanel No. 5." — Olivia Nuzzi, "Donald Trump's Final Campaign", New York Magazine (December 23, 2022)
Literary"The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering." — Tom Waits "We read, frequently if unknowingly, in quest of a mind more original than our own." — Harold Bloom, How to Read and Why (2000) "[Ella] es tan generosa que, hasta cuando cree que me riñe, me hace el mejor de los elogios: 'Mario, para lo único que tú sirves es para escribir.'" / "[She] is so generous that even when she thinks she is rebuking me, she pays me the highest compliment: 'Mario, the only thing you're good for is writing.'" — Mario Vargas Llosa, thanking his wife Patricia on his receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature (2010). "Motherfuckers will read a book that's one third elvish, but put two sentences in Spanish and they think we're taking over." — Junot Diaz, in response to "Do you think using Spanish in your writing alienates some readers?" (2012)
Miscellaneous"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him." — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) "A certain dexterity in games of skill argues a well-balanced mind, but such dexterity as you have shown is evidence, I fear, of a misspent youth." — Herbert Spencer, to an unexpectedly superior opponent at billiards (1820-1903) "San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place... There was madness in any direction, at any hour... You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning... We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave... So now, less than five years later, you can go up a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back." — Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971) "I've dealt with numbers all my life, of course, and after a while you begin to feel that each number has a personality of its own. A twelve is very different from a thirteen, for instance. Twelve is upright, conscientious, intelligent, whereas thirteen is a loner, a shady character who won't think twice about breaking the law to get what he wants. Eleven is tough, an outdoorsman who likes tramping through the woods and scaling mountains; ten is rather simpleminded, a blank figure who always does what he's told; nine is deep and mystical, a Buddha of contemplation... Numbers have souls, and you can't help but get involved with them in a personal way." — Paul Auster, The Music of Chance (1990) "One melancholy lesson of advancing years is the realization that you can't make old friends." — Christopher Hitchens (1999)
Back to Kiskeya.Net |