Waiting Quotes - page 66
Does anybody now believe in the story of the serpent? I pity any man or woman who, in this nineteenth century, believes in that childish fable. Why did Adam and Eve disobey? Why, they were tempted. By whom? The devil. Who made the devil? God. What did God make him for? Why did he not tell Adam and Eve about this serpent? Why did he not watch the devil, instead of watching Adam and Eve? Instead of turning them out, why did he not keep him from getting in? Why did he not have his flood first, and drown the devil, before he made a man and woman. And yet, people who call themselves intelligent-professors in colleges and presidents of venerable institutions-teach children and young men that the Garden of Eden story is an absolute historical fact. I defy any man to think of a more childish thing. This God, waiting around Eden-knowing all the while what would happen-having made them on purpose so that it would happen, then does what? Holds all of us responsible, and we were not there.
Robert G. Ingersoll
In the summer of 1959, as in the summer of 1957, I worked as a clerk-typist in the headquarters of the U.S. Public Health Service in Washington. The people I worked for were very nice and I grew to like them. One day, a man had a heart attack at around 5 PM, on the sidewalk outside the Public Health Service. He was taken inside to the nurse's room, where he was asked if he was a government employee. If he were, he would have been eligible to be taken to a medical facility there. Unfortunately, he was not, so a phone call was made to a local hospital to send an ambulance. By the time this ambulance made its way through miles of Washington rush-hour traffic, the man was dead. He died waiting for a doctor, in a building full of doctors. Nothing so dramatized for me the nature of a bureaucracy and its emphasis on procedures, rather than results.
Thomas Sowell
When Kate Bush came along, sort of '78, I was in The Slits, and I remember I was sitting in a van outside our singer's house, waiting to do a gig, and "Wuthering Heights" came on the radio, and I was like "Ooh, WHAT? What's this?" And I kept waiting for the melody to repeat, because, you know, at that time, pop music was very much Radio One, you know it was repeating melodies very quickly, and this melody it meandered on, and this high-pitched voice warbling and dropping, but I was absolutely spellbound.
Kate Bush
We are talking over telephones, as Shakespeare could not talk;
We are riding out in motor-cars where Homer had to walk;
And pictures Dante labored on of mediaeval Hell
The nearest cinematograph paints quicker, and as well. But ye copy, copy always; - and ye marvel when ye find
This new beauty, that new meaning, - while a model stands behind,
Waiting, young and fair as ever, till some singer turn and trace
Something of the deathless wonder of life lived in any place.
Hey, my masters, turn from piddling to the turmoil and the strife!
Cease from sonneting, my brothers; let us fashion songs from life.
James Branch Cabell