My random .sigs

All quotes attributed to a single work of an author are deemed to be part of a favorable review of that work.

All quotes attributed to an author's name only are deemed to be part of a favorable review of that author's entire ouvre.

And, of course, all copyrights are acknowledged.

For those of you who look at the whole daily page calandar on New Year's Day, here is the whole list:


• In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in folly.
  [Samuel Taylor Coleridge]

• Sometimes there just aren't enough rocks.
  [Forest Gump]

• The only thing you can say with certainty about the
  future is that you won't like it. [Connie Willis]

• Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the men of old;
  seek what they sought. [Matsuo Basho]

• Nothing is less productive than to make more efficient
  that which should not be done at all. [Peter Drucker]

• "the price of aesthetic education is never small."
  [Dorothy Dunnett]

• "colorless green ideas sleep furiously." [Noam Chomsky]

• "companionship is no small thing to create"
  [Ivan Doig]

• "there is no substitute for cubic inches."

• We sense that life is a dark comedy and maybe we can live
  with that. However, because the whole thing is written for
  the entertainment of the gods, too many of the jokes go
  right over our heads. [D. R. Koontz]

• ...I studied with diligence Neptune's laws,
  and these laws I tried to obey... [Joshua Slocum]

• It is impossible to protect anyone completely
  without enslaving them. [Vonda N. McIntyre]

• "ethics is the science of morals, & morals are the
  practice of ethics." [Fowler]

• "things fall apart; the center cannot hold.
  but what the hell, it's home." [Yeats, Lehrer & Zelazny]

• "humph!" said the Camel. [Rudyard Kipling]
  "i shouldn't say that again if i were you," said the Djinn.

• {If you're reading this, you probably don't know
  how to use your kill file.}

• [T]he land's main function [is] to provide marine stores --
  it [is] not a place for real existance. [Patrick O'Brian]

• "since at first there was no space, | cao xueqin ca. 1760
  things can have no proper place." | [tsao schwechin]
  [I find this a fascinating pre-big-bang cosmology.]

• The prudent mariner will not rely solely on any single aid to navigation.
  [printed repeatedly in NOAA publications]

• If there was something I'd rather be doing,
  I'd be doing it.

• Learning rules is useful but it isn't education.
  [Alice V. Middleton as quoted by Wm. Least Heat Moon]

• "teach me to pronounce 're-engineering' without sounding
  totally sarcastic." [Carol A. Simpson]

• "the rain falls on both the just and unjust fella'.
  it falls harder on the just, for the unjust has the just's umbrella."
  [Unknown]

• The best navigators are not always certain of where they are,
  but they are always aware of their uncertainty. [unknown]

• "i don't think you can have a viking funeral, dear. there's
  an open-burning ban." [Guindon]

• When all the parameters change, its not possible to
  say which caused the whirlwind. [Elizabeth Moon]

• "...a fellow widely considered a half bubble off plumb
  gets out of much tedious explanation."
  [William Least Heat Moon in _PrairyErth_]

• "writing is nature's way of letting you know how sloppy your thinking is."
  [Guindon]

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