quotes at random no.47 ~ long form

[fiefoe]

"You Blow My Mind. Hey, Mickey!" / JOHN JEREMIAH SULLIVAN

• Many of the best vacation memories of my life I owe to these strategies, which prove again a useful principle for all couples: don’t try to change each other. Study and subvert each other.
• A small child on Disneying Eve is a thoroughbred before the gates open.
• My father could not have Disneyed. It requires something, not willpower, exactly, but willingness.
• It seems like a lot of what you end up doing as a parent is trying to figure out ways to save your children from you.
• Disney World is a giant mound, one of the greatest ever constructed in North America. When you’re walking around in the park, you’re about 15 feet above where construction began.
• There is something unnatural or I should say unearthly about Lil’ Dog’s weight, or his density. It was like carrying a meteorite.
• There is deep yearning at Disney. What you feel when you’re in the state we were in and all of your emotional pores are wide open is yearning. There is something at stake here, for the families, in terms of that knife edge between joy and disappointment.
• There’s usually one thought, from any binge, that will seem true even afterward, and sometimes for the rest of your life, and it was this, that if there’s no free will, as I more and more doubt there to be, we don’t need to go crazy with guilt and worry about our children.

“The Last Two Veterans Of WWI” / EVAN FLEISCHER

• There are two veterans of the First World War left in the world. Of all the parts of the world that move on without you, of all the borders beyond the horizon, of all the varying speeds and trajectories and characters and stories colluding together in giant waves of "now," "yet-to-come," "once was," and then it boils down to two. It’s not even the whole hand.
• (Or just open up The Upanishads: "We are like the spider. / We weave our life and / then move along it.”)
• discovering that there were drills so specific they included ‘Secure captain in straitjacket and send him to flagship,’ ‘Chief cook to report on board flagship with fried eggs,’ or that first bit of action, where the gunners on his ship claimed to have shot down a zeppelin.
• While waiting at the train station to be taken back, they grew impatient, realized that they could drive and fire an engine, stole a train,
• another generation was springing up—"daisies amongst the concrete."
• But we just can’t walk underneath a sky as blue as this, as nice as this, and as sweet as this without nodding towards time’s cavernous past, too.

”Joplin Tornado Stories" / LUKE DITTRICH
__ But Trace, who used to be kind of obsessed with tornadoes, who spent fifth grade exercising his library card to learn everything he could on the subject, who knows that hail is associated with their edges, and that therefore, if you are hit by a tornado, hail is a sign that the worst is over, continues to smile up at Corey, showing off his melting jewel.

"Dr. Don" / PETER HESSLER

• "but one guy challenged me to checkers. I always thought it was kind of a simple game, but I accepted. And he beat me nine or ten games in a row. That’s sort of like living in a small town. It’s a simpler game, but it’s played to a higher level.”
• He took a course in Montrose in order to be licensed to use a bowling-lane micrometer.
• Don’s collection of certifications is impressively esoteric. He has taken CPR courses, and he’s qualified to use an electric defibrillator. He has a pyrotechnics-display license, so that Nucla can have fireworks on the Fourth of July.
• He saw connections of a different sort: these people and incidents were more like the spokes of a wheel. They didn’t touch directly, but each was linked to something bigger, and Don’s role was to try to keep the whole thing moving the best he could.

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