Summer Quotes - page 52
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
I don't think being 13 to 15 is an easy time for any boy. It's like a big puberty race, and if you're coming in last, it's not such a great race to be in. I was a hyper-religious, quite naive and very judgmental kid. I was unpopular for three years, and then it all kind of switched when I was 16. But I had already been marked with the "I'm going to fucking get out of here and show you bastards what's what” tag. So I'm very grateful for that period of challenge between 13 and 16, facing the blinkeredness of that kind of schoolboy mentality of, like, "You're gay, you're bad at sports, you're this, you're that.” Because it did make me think: "I don't want to end up in some bank, where I'm going to have to take this kind of shit off these same people for the rest of my life. I need to get out of this fucking treadmill 'public school, into university, into a bank, into a summer house in France'.”.
Chris Martin
Swift Summer into the Autumn flowed,
And frost in the mist of the morning rode .
And plants, at whose names the verse feels loath,
Filled the place with a monstrous undergrowth,
Prickly, and pulpous, and blistering, and blue,
Livid, and starred with a lurid dew.
And agarics, and fungi, with mildew and mould
Started like mist from the wet ground cold;
Pale, fleshy, as if the decaying dead
With a spirit of growth had been animated!
Spawn, weeds, and filth, a leprous scum,
Made the running rivulet thick and dumb,
And at its outlet flags huge as stakes
Dammed it up with roots knotted like water-snakes.
Percy Bysshe Shelley