Clippings

I haven't finished A Gentleman in Moscow yet, but I checked Amor Towle's other book out of the library within reading a chapter of this one so that I could put it in my queue right away.

-"How would a princess spend her day?"
"Like any young lady," answered the Count. With a nod of the head, the girl encouraged him to continue. "In the morning, she would have lessons in French, history, music. After her lessons, she might visit with friends or walk in the park. And at lunch she would eat her vegetables."
"My father says that princesses personify the decadence of a vanquished era."
The Count was taken aback. "Perhaps a few," he conceded. "But not all, I assure you."
She waved her fork. "Don't worry. Papa is wonderful and he knows everything there is to know about the workings of tractors. But he knows absolutely nothing about the workings of princesses."

-From among them, Nina picked up what looked like a delicate spade with a plunger and an ivory handle. Depressing the lever, Nina watched as the two opposing blades opened and shut, then she looked to the Count in wonder. "An asparagus server," he explained. "Does a banquet really need an asparagus server?" "Does an orchestra need a bassoon?" And Nina returned it gently to the shelf.

-"So," said the Count, "are you looking forward to your visit home?" "Yes, it will be nice to see everyone," said Nina. "But when we return to Moscow in January, I shall be starting school." "You don't seem very excited by the prospect." "I fear it will be dreadfully dull," she admitted, "and positively overrun with children." The Count nodded gravely to acknowledge the indisputable likelihood of children in the schoolhouse.

-As yet unchallenged, somnolence continued to cast its shadow over sights and sensations, over forms and formulations, over what has been said and what must be done, lending each the insubstantiality of its domain. But when the Count opened the small wooden drawer of the grinder, the world and all it contained were transformed by that very envy of the alchemists--the aroma of freshly ground coffee. In that instant, darkness was separated from light, the waters from the lands, and the heavens from the earth. The trees bore fruit and the woods rustled with the movement of the birds and beasts and all manner of creeping things.

From Circe (Madeline Miller)
"Will you tell me, what is a mortal like?" It was a child's question, but he nodded gravely. "There is no single answer. They are each different. The only thing they share is death. You know the word?" "I know it," I said. "But I do not understand." "No god can. Their bodies crumble and pass into earth. Their souls turn to cold smoke and fly to the underworld. There they eat nothing and drink nothing and feel no warmth. Everything they reach for slips from their grasp." A chill shivered across my skin. "How do they bear it?" "As best they can."

From Endure (Alex Hutchinson)
-That lesson, he recalled, stuck with him--first as an athlete and later as a scientist: "You have to teach athletes, somewhere in their careers, that they can do more than they think they can."

-Even the humblest Kenyan runner, he noticed, wakes up every morning with the firm conviction that today, finally, will be his or her day. They run with the leaders because they think they can beat them, and if harsh reality proves that they can't, they regroup and try again the next day. And that belief, fostered by the longstanding international dominance of generations of Kenyan runners, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

-Researchers in Scandinavia have recently shown that glycogen stores in your muscles don't just act as energy reservoirs; they also help individual muscle fibers contract efficiently That means your muscles will weaken as you burn through your glycogen stores, sapping your strength long before you're actually out of fuel. In effect, your muscles have a cunning self-defense mechanism that's totally independent of the brain, the equivalent of having your car's maximum speed linked to the level of its fuel gauge. Moreover, they'll preferentially burn some of the glycogen within the muscle before turning to glucose from your bloodstream--which means, in practical terms, that all the Gatorade in the world won't stave off fatigue indefinitely.

From What the Dog Saw (Malcolm Gladwell)
-We shouldn't be raising standards. We should be lowering them, because there is no point in raising standards if standards don't track with what we care about. Teaching should be open to anyone with a pulse and a college degree--and teachers should be judged after they have started their jobs, not before.

-The trick to finding ideas is to convince yourself that everyone and everything has a story to tell. I say trick but what I really mean is challenge, because it's a very hard thing to do. Our instinct as humans, after all, is to assume that most things are not interesting. We flip through the channels on the television and reject ten before we settle on one.

From Rabbit is Rich (John Updike)
-From a certain angle the most terrifying thing in the world is your own life, the fact that it's yours and nobody else's.

-How can you respect the world when you see it's being run by a bunch of kids turned old?

-He doesn't see what Harry sees in [golf]--infinity, an opportunity for infinite improvement.

From Rabbit Redux (John Updike)
-Nothing feels worse than other people's good times.

-There is that scent in the air, of going back to school, of beginning again and reconfirming the order that exists. He wants to feel good, he always used to feel good at every turning of the year, every vacation or end of vacation, every new sheet on the calendar; but his adult life has proved to have no seasons, only changes of weather, and the older he gets, the less weather interests him.

From Enlightenment Now (Steven Pinker)
-It's not that Goldilocks is always right and that the truth always falls halfway between two extremes. It's that current societies have winnowed out the worst blunders of the past, so if a society is functioning halfway decently--if the streets aren't running with blood, if obesity is a bigger problem than malnutrition, if the people who vote with their feet are clamoring to get in rather than racing for the exits--then its current institutions are probably a good starting point (itself a lesson we can take from Burkean conservatism). Reason tells us that political deliberation would be most fruitful if it treated government more like scientific experimentation and less like an extreme-sports competition.

From The Sense of Style (Steven Pinker)
-Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

-Researchers are apt to lose sight of whom they are writing for, and narcissistically describe the obsessions of their guild rather than what the audience really wants to know.

-Classic writing, with its assumption of equality between writer and reader, makes the reader feel like a genius. Bad writing makes the reader feel like a dunce.

-The early bird gets the worm, for example, is plain. The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese is classic. Classic style overlaps with plain and practical styles.