Petroski Auction Quotes & Sayings

The human mind has evolved a defense against contamination by biological agents: the emotion of disgust.111 Ordinarily triggered by bodily secretions, animal parts, parasitic insects and worms, and vectors of disease, disgust impels people to eject the polluting substance and anything that looks like it or has been in contact with it. Disgust is easily moralized, defining a continuum in which one pole is identified with spirituality, purity, chastity, and cleansing and the other with animality, defilement, carnality, and contamination. 112 And so we see disgusting agents as not just physically repellent but also morally contemptible. Many metaphors in the English language for a treacherous person use a disease vector as their vehicle - a rat, a louse, a worm, a cockroach. The infamous 1990s term for forced displacement and genocide was ethnic cleansing. — Steven Pinker

What does it matter where my body happens to be?' he said. 'My mind goes on working all the same. — Lewis Carroll

Venus hasn't been to the semis for a couple of years in a Grand Slam - she's been coming back from injury. — Tracy Austin

I try to get underneath the skin of all kinds of music, and I never know what's going to inspire me and what makes me crazy. — Jason Robert Brown

I'm from Manchester, Mass., so it was lobster, lobster and more lobster! Also, lots of fish that we caught in the summers, clam chowder and roast beef sandwiches. But my mom was pretty healthy; we had a lot of chicken and broccoli and rice as well. — Sprague Grayden

We all know what we should have done as we look backward. Yet looking backward further still, we may say that all goes as the Wild Magic wills. And we must look forward if we are to live long enough to look backward. — Mercedes Lackey

They keep saying the right person will come along. I think mine got hit by a truck. — Erica Jong

Read day and night, devour books - these sleeping pills - not to know but to forget! Through books you can retrace your way back to the origins of spleen, discarding history and its illusions. — Emil Cioran