User:Silence/Sampler

I chose the first four complete sentences from page 13 of each book, as being late enough to be representative but early enough to avoid spoilers. I've found that these random selections, for being brief and out-of-context, give a surprisingly accurate impression of each book's topic and tone.

Titus Andronicus, by Shakespeare
    Tell me, Andronicus, does this motion please thee? TITUS. It doth, my worthy lord, and in this match I hold me highly honoured of your Grace, And here in sight of Rome, to Saturnine, King and commander of our commonweal, The wide world's Emperor, do I consecrate My sword, my chariot, and my prisoners, Presents well worthy Rome's imperious lord; Resolve them then, the tribute that I owe, Mine honour's ensigns humbled at thy feet. SATURNINUS. Thanks, noble Titus, father of my life. How proud I am of thee and of thy gifts Rome shall record; and when I do forget The least of these unspeakable deserts, Romans, forget your fealty to me.

The Accidental Mind, by Linden
The important difference between these two situations is that when the force is generated by bar pressing, making a stronger tap requires generating more force with the fingertip. When the joystick is used, however, the motor does the work and there is only a weak correlation between the force generated by the tapping finger and the force produced on the upturned finger of the other subject. When the tit-for-tat experiment is then repeated with joysticks there is very little force escalation. The interpretation here is similar to that offered for self-tickling: The cerebellum receives a copy of the commands to produce the finger tap (using the bar) that are proportional to the force applied.

Absalom, Absalom!, by Faulkner
And most of all, I do not plead myself: a young woman emerging from a holocaust which had taken parents security and all from her, who had seen all that living meant to her fall into ruins about the feet of a few figures with the shapes of men but with the names and statures of heroes;&mdash;a young woman I say thrown into daily and hourly contact with one of these men who, despite what he might have been at one time and despite what she might have believed or even known about him, had fought for four honorable years for the soil and traditions of the land where she had been born (and the man who had done that, villain dyed though he be, would have possessed in her eyes, even if only from association with them, the stature and shape of a hero too) and now he also emerging from the same holocaust in which she had suffered, with nothing to face what the future held for the South but his bare hands and the sword which he at least had never surrendered and the citation for valor from his defeated Commander-in-Chief. Oh he was brave. I have never gainsaid that. But that our cause, our very life and future hopes and past pride, should have been thrown into the balance with men like that to buttress it&mdash;men with valor and strength but without pity or honor.

The Blind Watchmaker, by Dawkins
I can spin the wheels at random, look at whatever number is displayed and exclaim with hindsight: 'How amazing. The odds against that number appearing are 4,096:1. A minor miracle!' That is equivalent to regarding the particular arrangement of rocks in a mountain, or of bits of metal in a scrap-heap, as 'complex'.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being, by Kundera
Although her new job did not require any particular qualifications, it raised her status from waitress to member of the press. When Sabina herself introduced Tereza to everyone on the weekly, Tomas knew he had never had a better friend as a mistress than Sabina. 6 The unwritten contract of erotic friendship stipulated that Tomas should exclude all love from his life. The moment he violated that clause of the contract, his other mistresses would assume inferior status and become ripe for insurrection.

Fahrenheit 451, by Bradbury
His foot, sending vibrations ahead, received back echoes of the small barrier across its path even as the foot swung. His foot kicked. The object gave a dull clink and slid off in darkness. He stood very straight and listened to the person on the dark bed in the completely featureless night.

Brave New World, by Huxley
The first of a batch of two hundred and fifty embryonic rocket-plane engineers was just passing the eleven hundred metre mark on Rack 3. A special mechanism kept their containers in constant rotation. "To improve their sense of balance," Mr. Foster explained. "Doing repairs on the outside of a rocket in mid-air is a ticklish job.

Either/Or, by Kierkegaard
One should never undertake any business. If you do, you will become a mere Peter Flere, a tiny little cog in the machinery of the body politic; you even cease to be master of your own conduct, and in that case your theories are of little help. You receive a title, and this brings in its train every sin and evil. The law under which you have become a slave is equally tiresome, whether your advancement is fast or slow.

Your Digusting Head, by Haggis-On-Whey
The Animal Trait Re-Assigning Voting Commission, or K.I.T.T.Y., as it's sometimes known, has given us some amazing animal makeovers over the years. The way it works is as follows: every year, all animals gather over a simple potluck dinner, in Daytona Beach. There, a few select species can vote on which traits they currently own but would like to subtract, on what grounds, and what they would like to replace it with. In the barracudas' case, earwax was substituted for a scarf of fine cashmere.

Neverwhere, by Gaiman
         The photograph had a yellow Post-it note stuck to it. It was a Friday afternoon. Richard had noticed that events were cowards: they didn't occur singly, but instead they would run in packs and leap out at him all at once. Take this particular Friday, for example.

On Kierkegaard, by Anderson
So only the words of people who are prepared to die for their beliefs are worth reading. What people say or write which is not supported by actions are mere words. (2) Kierkegaard was typically not understood by those around him.1 It took time for his profound thoughts to find a receptive audience&mdash;about a century for the world of Philosophy to discover and fully appreciate him2: "If this generation will not listen to my words, there will come another one after this, which perhaps will."3

The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard, by Various
Nowhere is this more true than when he and his pseudonyms articulate what he sometimes calls a "second" or "new ethics," that is, one that unlike Greek ethics assumes and takes into account the sinfulness of human beings. In an essay that, like Ronald M. Green's, relates Kierkegaard to Kant, Philip L. Quinn ("Kierkegaard's Christian Ethics") presents some central features and problems confronting Kierkegaard's ethico-religious position. Focusing on the signed Works of Love and the pseudonymous Practice in Christianity, Quinn examines Kierkegaard's insistence that Jesus commands us to a nonpreferential form of love. Quinn explains how Kierkegaard confronts the Kantian objection that love, as a feeling, is not subject to the will and so cannot be commanded.

Theaetetus, by Plato
         There is another point also in which those who associate with me are like women in child-birth. They suffer the pains of labour, and are filled day and night with distress; indeed they suffer far more than women. And this pain my art is able to bring on, and also to allay. Well, that's what happens to them; but at times, Theaetetus, I come across people who do not seem to me somehow to be pregnant.

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, by Hadiway
I once heard Nao Kao Lee begin a description of his village by saying, "It was where I was born and where my father was born and died and was buried and where my father's father died and was buried, but my father's father was born in China and to tell you about that would take all night." If a Hmong tells a fable, for example, about Why Animals Cannot Talk or Why Doodle Bugs Roll Balls of Dung, he is likely to begin with the beginning of the world. (Actually, according to Dab Neeg Hmoob: Myths, Legends and Folk Tales from the Hmong of Laos, a bilingual collection edited by Charles Johnson, those two fables go back to the second beginning of the world, the time after the universe turned upside down and the earth was flooded with water and everyone drowned except a brother and sister who married each other and had a child who looked like an egg, whom they hacked into small pieces.) If I were Hmong, I might feel that what happened when Lia Lee and her family encountered the American medical system could be understood fully only by beginning with the first beginning of the world.

Immortality, by Kundera
         That was the same with the project we call mankind. The computer did not plan an Agnès or a Paul, but only a prototype known as a human being, giving rise to a large number of specimens that are based on the original model and haven't any individual essence. Just like a Renault car, its essence is deposited outside, in the archives of the central engineering office. Individual cars differ only in their serial number.

Fear and Trembling, by Kierkegaard
         So all was lost, more terrible than if it had never been! So the Lord was only making sport of Abraham! Through a miracle he had made the preposterous come true, now he would see it again brought to nothing. Foolery indeed!

Apology for Raymond Sebond, by Montaigne
<font face="times new roman">         And shall we believe this: "For whom then shall we say the world was made? Why, for those animate beings who have the use of reason. These are gods and men, to whom surely nothing is superior."24 We can never have done enough to defy the impudence of claiming this conjunction.>>

Meditations on First Philosophy, by Descartes
<font face="times new roman">But whenever this preconceived opinion about the supreme power of God occurs to me, I cannot help admitting that, were he to wish it, it would be easy for him to cause me to err even in those matters that I think I intuit as clearly as possible with the eyes of the mind. On the other hand, whenever I turn my attention to those very things that I think I perceive with such great clarity, I am so completely persuaded by them that I spontaneously blurt out these words: "let anyone who can do so deceive me; so long as I think that I am something, he will never bring it about that I am nothing. Nor will he even bring it about that perhaps two plus three might equal more or less than five, or similar items in which I recognize an obvious contradiction." And certainly, because I have no reason for thinking that there is a God who is a deceiver (and of course I do not yet sufficiently know whether there even is a God), the basis for doubting, depending as it does merely on the above hypothesis, is very tenuous and, so to speak, metaphysical.

Discourse on Method, by Descartes
<font face="times new roman">But having noted that the principles of these sciences must all be derived from philosophy, in which I did not yet find any that were certain, I thought that it was necessary for me first of all to try to establish some there and that, this being the most important thing in the world, and the thing in which hasty judgment and prejudice were most to feared, I should not try to accomplish that objective until I had reached a much more mature age than that of merely twenty-three, which I was then, and until I had first spent a great deal of time preparing myself for it, as much in rooting out from my mind all the wrong opinions that I had accepted before that time as in accumulating many experiences, in order for them later to be the subject matter of my reasonings, and in always practicing the method I had prescribed for myself so as to strengthen myself more and more in its use. PART THREE And finally, just as it is not enough, before beginning to rebuild the house where one is living, simply to pull it down, and to make provision for materials and architects or to train oneself in architecture, and also to have carefully drawn up the building plans for it; but it is also necessary to be provided with someplace else where one can live comfortably while working on it; so too, in order not to remain irresolute in my actions while reason required me to be so in my judgments, and in order not to cease to live as happily as possible during this time, I formulated a provisional code of morals, which consisted of but three or four maxims, which I very much want to share with you. The first was to obey the laws and the customs of my country, constantly holding on to the religion in which, by God's grace, I had been instructed from my childhood, and governing myself in everything else according to the most moderate opinions and those furthest from excess&mdash;opinions that were commonly accepted in practice by the most judicious of those with whom I would have to live. For, beginning from then on to count my own opinions as nothing because I wished to submit them all to examination, I was assured that I could not do better than to follow those of the most judicious.

The History of Scepticism, by Popkin
<font face="times new roman">External conditions cannot be altered. In light of these practical considerations, we can only apply our instruments of judgment, our senses and reason, in a conditional manner, being "reasonable" in our evaluations on the basis of common sense and past experience and eliminating as far as possible the controllable conditions, like malice and hate, that interfere with our judgment.39 Castellio's partial skepticism represents another facet of the problem of knowledge raised by the Reformation. If it is necessary to discover a "rule of faith," a criterion for distinguishing true faith from false faith, how is this to be accomplished?

Against Method, by Feyerabend
<font face="times new roman">'It is not so clear,' writes a modern 'radical' professor at Columbia,10 'that scientific research demands an absolute freedom of speech and debate. Rather the evidence suggests that certain kinds of unfreedom place no obstacle in the way of science....' There are certainly some people to whom this is 'not so clear'. Let us, therefore, start with our outline of an anarchistic methodology and a corresponding anarchistic science.

Quantum Mechanics and Experience, by Albert
<font face="times new roman">Most of them run into the screen and are stopped there. Some get through the hole. Those latter land at various points on the fluorescent screen. The statistics of those landings (that is: how many land in any particular region) are shown in the figure.

The Book of Antennae, by Higgs
<font face="times new roman">CHOOSE a theoretical bomb target to learn where you stand and pray that your face inverts&mdash; Know that the trees are passive spies and behave accordingly&mdash; If the brain is considered a length of intestine&mdash; The eye catapults sights from itself and sound is sown by the ear

Crazy Dave, by Johnston
<font face="times new roman">         Two more years went by before Ed Johnston was ready to marry Rosa. This was in 1896. "You're so lucky!" girlfriends and neighbors told Rosa. Only twenty and she had already married the most eligible young man on the reserve.

The Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard
<font face="times new roman">The impotence of the logical consists in the transition of logic into becoming, where existence [Tilværelse]26 and actuality come forth. So when logic becomes deeply absorbed in the concretion of the categories, that which was from the beginning is ever the same. Every movement, if for the moment one wishes to use this expression, is an immanent movement, which in a profound sense is no movement at all. One can easily convince oneself of this by considering that the concept of movement is itself a transcendence that has no place in logic.

How to Dress for Every Occasion, by The Pope
<font face="times new roman">THE NIGHTLIFE HERE WE MIGHT HAVE some sort of conflict problems. My personal opinion is that you're not going to get ahead in this world if you get into the nightlife. (One bishop sees you and it's kaput!!) Plus places like nightclubs and discos are "not my style" and I don't think they're your style either, frankly.

Knowledge and Social Imagery, by Bloor
<font face="times new roman">It is the theoretical component of science which gives scientists the terms in which they see their own and other's actions. Hence those descriptions of actions which are involved in the imputation of a discovery are precisely the ones which become problematic when important discoveries are taking place. Now it should be possible to offer an account of why some discoveries are less prone to create priority disputes than others. The original empirical generalisation can be refined.

The Sickness unto Death, by Kierkegaard
<font face="times new roman">The possibility of this sickness is man's advantage over the beast; to be aware of this sickness is the Christian's advantage over natural man; to be cured of this sickness is the Christian's blessedness. Consequently it is an infinite merit to be able to despair. And yet not only is it the greatest misfortune and misery actually to be in despair; no, it is ruin. Generally the relation between possibility and actuality8 is not like this; if the ability to be such and such is meritorious, then it is an even greater merit actually to be it.

Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty, by Murphy
<font face="times new roman">By cracking open, I am looking for an abstract regularity to the way objects, subjects, practices, and words articulated each other. What I am trying to describe by writing about assemblages are historical regularities.19 Regularities are not simply a set of objects or phrases that appear often in the historical record. What I am calling regularities are not hidden, though historical actors may not necessarily recognize them.

Mapping Fate, by Wexler
<font face="times new roman">He made the telephone call, but Feigenbaum declined to give any information. Dad did not pursue the matter and forgot about it for almost fifty years, when it suddenly occurred to him that perhaps both Sabina and Mom had been trying to tell him something that neither one could bring herself to acknowledge. At the time he met my mother, my father, Milton Wexler, was twenty-eight years old and practicing law, a profession he hated, in a small office at Broadway and Forty-second Street in midtown Manhattan. Like Abraham Sabin, Dad's grandparents, Moishe (later Morris) and Rose Wexler, had come to the United States from Russia as part of the great wave of east European Jewish immigration.

Gravity's Rainbow, by Pynchon
<font face="times new roman">         He will then actually skip to and fro, with his knees high and twirling a walking stick with W. C. Fields' head, nose, top hat, and all, for its knob, and surely capable of magic, while the band plays a second chorus. Accompanying will be a phantasmagoria, a real one, rushing toward the screen, in over the heads of the audiences, on little tracks of an elegant Victorian cross section resembling the profile of a chess knight conceived fancifully but not vulgarly so&mdash;then rushing back out again, in and out, the images often changing scale so quickly, so unpredictably that you're apt now and then to get a bit of lime-green in with your rose, as they say. The scenes are highlights from Pirate's career as a fantasist-surrogate, and go back to when he was carrying, everywhere he went, the mark of Youthful Folly growing in an unmistakable Mongoloid point, right out of the middle of his head. He had known for a while that certain episodes he dreamed could not be his own.

The Selfish Gene, by Dawkins
<font face="times new roman">This is originally where the elements on our world came from. Sometimes when atoms meet they link up together in chemical reactions to form molecules, which may be more or less stable. Such molecules can be very large. A crystal such as a diamond can be regarded as a single large molecule, a proverbially stable one in this case, but also a very simple one since its internal atomic structure is endlessly repeated.

The Poisonwood Bible, by Kingsolver
<font face="times new roman">Leah Price WE CAME FROM BETHLEHEM, Georgia, bearing Betty Crocker cake mixes into the jungle. My sisters and I were all counting on having one birthday apiece during our twelve-month mission. "And heaven knows," our mother predicted, "they won't have Betty Crocker in the Congo." "Where we are headed, there will be no buyers and sellers at all," my father corrected.

You Shall Know Our Velocity!, by Eggers
<font face="times new roman">"And this is new," she said, touching my nose, the red crooked stripe running down the bone. "That was already there, idiot!" Mo said. "Was not," Thor said. "It was there," I said, trying to settle things, "but it's darker now.

What is the What, by Eggers
<font face="times new roman">They were not bothering him, he said, they were half a world away. He wanted only to sell grain, corn, sugar, pots, fabric, candy. I was in his shop, playing on the floor one day. There was a commotion above my head.

The Sound and the Fury, by Faulkner
<font face="times new roman">The ones on the other side began again, bright and fast and smooth, like when Caddy says we are going to sleep. ''Cry baby, Luster said. Aint you shamed. We went through the barn.''

Nineteen Eighty-Four, by Orwell
<font face="times new roman">         The next moment a hideous, grinding screech, as of some monstrous machine running without oil, burst from the big telescreen at the end of the room. It was a noise that set one's teeth on edge and bristled the hair at the back of one's neck. The Hate had started. As usual, the face of Emmanuel Goldstein, the Enemy of the People, had flashed onto the screen.

The Book of Job, by Scheindlin
<font face="times new roman">But only five verses later, Job launches into a raging speech, cursing the day he was born and demanding to know why he was put on earth if all he is meant to do is suffer (chap. 3). This curse generates the debate between Job and his friends. For twenty-four chapters of verse (chaps. 4-27), the friends and Job take turns debating the meaning of his situation. The core of the book is this exchange of poem-speeches, which is organized in three cycles, with Job and the friends each speaking in turn.

The Glass Bead Game, by Hesse
<font face="times new roman">Indeed, many of its greatest figures, such as St. Thomas Aquinas, appear to us&mdash;like early Greek sculptures&mdash;more the classical representatives of types than individuals. Nevertheless, in the period before the reformation of the intellectual life, a reformation which began in the twentieth century and of which we are the heirs, that authentic ancient ideal had patently come near to being entirely lost. We are astonished when the biographies of those times rather garrulously relate how many brothers and sisters the hero had, or what psychological scars and blotches were left behind from his casting off the skins of childhood and puberty, from the struggle for position and the search for love. We moderns are not interested in a hero's pathology or family history, nor in his drives, his digestion, and how he sleeps.

Quick and Dirty Mental Operations, by Savion
<font face="times new roman">We try to accomplish these goals in a rather hostile environment, which challenges us routinely to organize and order the messy, incomplete, and ambiguous data we glean from it. The cognitive tools we bring to bear on meeting our tasks are magnificently complicated and effective, but they are also infected with severe limitations: tiny working-memory space, constraints on computational complexity, interference of affect on decision making, and a very slow deliberate-thinking apparatus. Our mental activities are governed by several cognitive principles. These principles, such as economy, equilibrium, and purposefulness employ heuristics (fallible fast processes) rather than the normative algorithmic rules to serve our adaptive goal.

The Robbers, by Schiller
<font face="times new roman"> She has denied me the delightful play of the heart, the all-persuasive eloquence of love.&mdash;Thus then will I extort my wishes with despotic violence; thus will I extirpate all those who set a restraint upon me, since I am not lord. SCENE II. AMELIA approaches slowly from the Apartments in the back of the Stage. FRANCIS. She comes!

Who Killed Amanda Palmer, by Gaiman
<font face="times new roman">We dine together every night. Facing each other across the dinner table. I painted her eyes on myself. The closed eyes disturbed me.

Repetition, by Kierkegaard
<font face="times new roman">Since against my will I had taken an observational approach to him, I could not refrain from all kinds of attempts to log, as the sailor says, the momentum of his melancholy. I set the tone for possible erotic moods&mdash;none. I explored the influence of change in the environment&mdash;in vain. Neither the broad bold assurance of the sea nor the hushed silence of the forest nor the beckoning solitude of the evening could bring him out of the melancholy longing in which he not so much drew near to the beloved as withdrew from her.