About 3.6 million years ago, a series of light ash eruptions from a nearby volcano coincided with a series of rain showers, probably at the onset of the rainy season. The ash filled depressions in the landscape, and the rain transformed them into mud pans. Animals crossed the pans while they were still wet, and their tracks were preserved as the ash dried hard as cement.
, Africa: A Biography of the Continent
“...and stay at my perfect weight and this age for the rest of my life and I would just go around the world continually following that line shouting advice and being mistaken for God.”
, QI
At the same time, immediately after May 1945, Germans, and especially the citizens of Berlin, were determined to restore some sense of normality in their lives. This effort found expression in a sometimes paradoxical reinstatement of routines and rituals of everyday civilian life that seemed incongruous alongside the rubble piles that constituted most of the city—such as opening fashion salons, organizing fashion shows, and launching a variety of magazines featuring fashion as their main theme.
, Film and Fashion Amidst the Ruins of Berlin
Besides, the idea of royal plumes in his hat revolted him. He'd always had a thing about plumes. Plumes sort of, well, bought you off, told everyone that you didn't belong to yourself. And he'd feel like a bird. It'd be the last straw.
, Guards! Guards! Both the red fox and the coyote are free of the night hours, and both killers for pure love of slaughter. The fox is no great talker, but the coyote goes garrulously through the dark in twenty keys at once, gossiping, warning, and abuse.
, The Land of Little Rain
"Can you swing a sack of doorknobs?"
, The Simpsons
Come down off the cross, we can use the wood.
, Come On Up to the House
“Did you never kill with your own hands?”
“It’s possible I did,” Girumuhatse said, “Because if I didn’t they’d have killed my wife.”
“Possible?” I said. “Or true?”
Bosco, the translator, said, “You know what he means,” and didn’t translate the question.
, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families
Egwene clung to Rand’s arm for two more bridges. He regretted it when she finally let go with a murmured apology and a forced laugh, and not just because it had felt good having her hold onto him that way. It was easier to be brave, he discovered, when someone needed your protection.
, The Eye of the World
He became a seeker of crowds, but the crowds thinned and abandoned him. He became a seeker of lights, but the lights grew strange and led him into desolate places.
, Songs of a Dead Dreamer
He died, as do most medicine-men of the Paiutes.
, The Land of Little Rain
He felt in his heart cruelty and cowardice, the things which made him brave and kind.
, The Once and Future King
I like the name the Indians give to the mountain of Lone Pine . . . Oppapago, The Weeper. It sits eastward and solitary from the lordliest ranks of the Sierras, and above a range of little, old, blunt hills, and has a bowed, grave aspect as of some woman you might have known, looking out across the grassy barrows of her dead.
, The Land of Little Rain
In the dark of the morning he rode out of the city on his horse Kanthaka, with his charioteer Chauna clinging desperately to the tail. Then Mara, Prince of Evil, appeared to him and tempted him, offering him great empires. But Buddha refused, and riding on, crossed a broad river with one mighty leap. A desire to look again at his native city arose in him, but he did not turn. Then the great earth turned round, so that he might not have to look back.
, Our Oriental Heritage
“Is he a man?” asked Lucy.
“Aslan a man!” said Mr Beaver sternly. Certainly not. I tell you he is King of the wood and the son of the great Emperor-Beyond-the-Sea. Don’t you know who is the King of the Beasts? Aslan is a lion – the Lion, the great lion.”
“Ooh!” said Susan, “I’d thought he was a man. Is he – quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion.”
“That you will, dearie, and no mistake” said Mrs Beaver; “if there’s anyone who can appear before Aslan without their knees knocking, they’re either braver than most or else just silly.”
“Then he isn’t safe?” said Lucy.
“Safe?” said Mr Beaver; “don’t you hear what Mrs Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.”
, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
It is the young watercress that tempts them and the pleasures of society, for they seldom drink. Even in localities where there are flowing streams they seem to prefer the moisture that collects on herbage, and after rains may be seen rising on their haunches to drink delicately the clear drops caught in the tops of the young sage. But drink they must, as I have often seen them mornings and evenings at the rill that goes by my door. Wait long enough at the Lone Tree Spring and sooner or later they will all come in.
, The Land of Little Rain
It seemed to Hazel that he would not be needing his body any more, so he left it lying on the edge of the ditch, but stopped for a moment to watch his rabbits…
, Watership Down
No two of Aksum’s six great stelae are identical, either in size or in the complexity of their decoration, but when arranged in order of increasing size the sequence corresponds exactly with the stylistic development of the decoration. Each stele is larger and more elaborately decorated than the one before. This “mania for the gigantic” appears to have ended with the greatest of the six stelae, possibly because its fall was interpreted as a bad omen, possibly because its manufacture demonstrated the sheer impossibility of hewing, transporting, and raising anything larger. The end of the series also appears to coincide with the period during which Aksum turned from the deification of kings to the worship of Christ, a coincidence which may have been purely fortuitous, but could have been significant.
, Africa: A Biography of the Continent
No tyrant in history was able to read, but every single one of them burned the books.
, Soul!
“People are like, ‘Well, Kane doesn’t have any scars from the fire.’ That was the thing—he never had any scars! But he wore a mask this whole time because he was convinced that he did.”
, The Broken Skull Sessions
People were stupid sometimes. They thought the Library was a dangerous place because of all the magical books, which was true enough, but what made it really one of the mot dangerous places there could ever be was the simple fact that it was a library.
, Guards! Guards!
“So Merlyn sent you to me," said the badger, "to finish your education. Well, I can only teach you two things—to dig, and love your home. These are the true end of philosophy.”
, The Once and Future King
"The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something." That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.”
, The Once and Future King
The boy in war is, to an extent found in almost no other form of work, inextricably bound up with the qualities and conditions―berry laden or snow laden―of the ground over which he walks or runs or crawls and with which he craves and courts identification, as in the camouflage clothing he wears and the camouflage postures he adopts, now running bent over parallel with the ground it is his work to mime, now arching forward conforming the curve of his back to the curve of a companion boulder, now standing as upright and still and narrow as the slender tree behind which he hides; he is the elms and the mud, he is one the hundred and sixth, he is a small piece of German terrain broken off and floating dangerously through the woods of France. He is a fragment of American earth wedged into an open hillside in Korea and reworked by its unbearable sun and rain. He is dark blue like the sea. He is light grey like the air through which he flies. He is sodden in the green shadows of earth. He is a light brown vessel of Australian blood that will soon be opened and emptied across the rocks and bridges of Gallipoli from which he can never again become distinguishable.
, The Body in Pain
The house was empty for years… The trees moved in and so did we.
, Stardew Valley
The PIDE agents usually worked in teams of four and in four-hour shifts against
a victim, until the victim's will and morale were broken. One PIDE agent explained
the evolution of torture in Portugal to Mrs Bastos while she was in prison: that years
ago only a lower elementary school education and the ability to beat people were
required in order to become a PIDE agent, but that in recent years the PIDE had come
to believe in psychological methods more than in physical ones, and that consequently
the PIDE recruited among graduates of secondary schools. The agent believed that in
the future higher and higher education would be necessary to be able to apply the
most complicated kinds of psychological torture.
, Workshop on Human Rights: Report & Recommendations, 1975
“There is so much beauty in these hidden corners of the world, even if they have no purpose.”
“Perhaps they are beautiful because they have no purpose.”
, The Talos Principle
This is the gilia the children call “evening snow,” and it is no use trying to improve on children’s names for wild flowers.
, The Land of Little Rain
Throughout the greater part of its evolutionary history, the human population of Africa has lived in relatively small groups, demonstrating that people are perfectly capable of living peacefully in small communities for millennia without establishing cities and states. Indeed, the most distinctively African contribution to human history has been precisely the civilized art of living fairly peaceably together not in states. Since Africa was the cradle-land of humanity it would be comforting to believe that small peaceful communities were an ideal mode of existence.
, Africa: A Biography of the Continent
“Well I’ll just wait for you here then. By the mausoleum. With my back turned and my defenses lowered.”
, Adventure Time