1. "The sloshing of their hooves in the paddy field that I heard thirty yards away, my car door open for the breeze, the haunting sound I was caught within as if creatures of magnificence were undressing and removing their wings"
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Michael Ondaatje, Handwriting
2. " bread and bacon, neolithic cultures had the backbone of a balanced diet, rich in energy, needing only fresh garden produce to be entirely adequate. With this security, it was possible to look ahead and plan ahead with confidence. Except in the tropical areas, where soil regeneration was not mastered, groups could now remain rooted in one spot, surrounded by fields under permanent cultivation, slowly making improvements in the landscape, digging ditches and irrigation canals, making terraces, planting trees, which later generations would be grateful for. Capital accumulation begins at this point: the end of hand-to-mouth living. With the domestication of grains, the future became predictable as never before; and the cultivator not merely sought to retain the ancestral past, but to expand all his present possibilities: once the daily bread was assured, those wider migrations and transplantations of men, which made the country town and the city possible, speedily followed."
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Lewis Mumford, Technics and Human Development
3. "God has ordered our existence to operate like a farmer planting seed in a field. If you pray and ask God for an oak tree, the Almighty might send you an acorn, because big things can come from small beginnings. God’s answer may not look like your request. So when you get an acorn but were expecting a tree, don’t throw the acorn away. Your tree is in the seed. God works through the agricultural principle of planting a seed and reaping a harvest. Your something small can become something mighty if you are a good steward of the seed."
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T.D. Jakes, Destiny: Step into Your Purpose
4. "ONCE I STOOD on the bank of a rice paddy in rural Sichuan Province, and a lean and aging Chinese peasant, wearing a faded forty-year-old blue jacket issued by the Mao government in the early years of the Revolution, stood knee deep in water and apropos of absolutely nothing shouted defiantly at me, We Chinese invented many things!"
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Mark Kurlansky, Salt: A World History
5. "A singularity is a point or region in spacetime at which some physical quantity such as the density of mass or energy, the temperature, or the strength of the gravitational field, becomes infinite. Whenever they happen, they pose serious difficulties for physics because they signal a breakdown in the description of the world in mathematical terms."
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Lee Smolin, The Life of the Cosmos
6. "[W]e have endless opportunities to forget the self – in planting a tree for future generations; in creating a poem, a meal, a vessel of clay;"
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Steve Hagen, Buddhism Plain and Simple
7. "The only defect in which excellent constitution seems to be, the difficulty of finding any man adequate to the office of an absolute monarch: for this indispensably requires three qualities very difficult, as it appears from history, to be found in princely natures: first, a sufficient quantity of moderation in the prince, to be contented with all the power which is possible for him to have. 2ndly, Enough of wisdom to know his own happiness. And, 3rdly, Goodness sufficient to support the happiness of others, when not only compatible with, but instrumental to his own. Now"
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Henry Fielding, History of Tom Jones
8. "One square yard of the zero-point field contains enough energy to boil all the water in the world."
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Ellyn Davis, The Physics of Heaven
9. "It must be represented, too, in great masses of accumulation, or it is not rightly protected. The characteristic essence of property, formed out of the combined principles of its acquisition and conservation, is to be unequal. The great masses, therefore, which excite envy, and tempt rapacity, must be put out of the possibility of danger. Then they form a natural rampart about the lesser properties in all their gradations. The same quantity of property which is by the natural"
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Edmund Burke, The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke
10. "Writing! The activity for which the only adequate bribe is the possibility of suicide, one day."
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Joyce Carol Oates, Wild Nights!: Stories About the Last Days of Poe