Chaotic Quotes - page 8
On Wednesday my watch broke, so yesterday I went across the street to the saddest mall in America. Half the stores were shuttered up and the fountain had been drained. The food court was gone except for a place called Granny's Fudgery, a wooden cart surrounded by card tables. I imagine the mall started going downhill when it accepted Walmart as a tenant. Anything you could find at Bill's Card Shop and the Record Bin could also be found there, where a customer could pay less and buy everything in one shot. I'd been to only one Walmart in my life before this and I was shocked at how ugly it was, even by American standards. It was a mammoth jumble of absolute shit made more chaotic by brightly colored signs and promotional displays. Yesterday's Walmart was even worse than the first, but the employees were incredibly friendly.
David Sedaris
I remember feeling that if I don't express this somehow, I'll despair, I'll go mad. Looking back, part of it was about trying to impose some kind of order in a process that was decidedly chaotic. Because of my profession, I tend to understand the world in words, in sequences of events. What I saw later was that I was trying to document as clearly as possible an emotional journey. And it felt important at the time that I remember it in its entirety and its complexity.
Melinda Lopez
I am always interested in the ways of scoring the sound of the poem, especially a poem with long lines. Spaces within a line, double colons, slashes, are indications of pause, of breath, of urgency, they are not metrically exact as in a musical notation but they serve (I hope) to make the reader think about the sound of the poem-just as traffic symbols, when driving, make us almost unconsciously aware of a steep hill, an intersection, an icy bridge etc. Poets have used such indicators long before modernism-Dickinson's dashes and capitals are one example. Contemporary composers have also expanded on classical notation with new, self-invented markings. You want to find a way that is not random or chaotic but allows for various renderings of a line, a punctuation of the imagination.
Adrienne Rich
In the interests of refuting such chaotic concepts as those which see a divine Church only in a "Church of the saints", an entirely invisible society which is nothing but a pure abstraction, we must not fall into the contrary error. The Church "in so far as visible" is also an abstraction, and our faith should never make separate what God from the beginning has joined together: [...] in ecclesiology just as [...] in Christology, [...] dissociation of the divine and the human [...] is fatal. If necessary, the experience of Protestantism should serve us as sufficient warning. Having stripped it of all its mystical attributes, it acknowledged in the visible Church a mere secular institution; as a matter of course it abandoned it to the patronage of the state and sought a refuge for the spiritual life in an invisible Church, its concept of which had evaporated into an abstract ideal.
Henri de Lubac
ExxonMobil, the world's largest and most powerful oil company, knew everything there was to know about climate change by the mid-1980s, and then spent the next few decades systematically funding climate denial and lying about the state of the science....
But though we know now that behind the scenes Exxon understood precisely what was going on, in public they feigned ignorance or worse....
Thanks to Exxon's willingness to sucker the world, that world is now a chaotic mess.
Bill McKibben
One of the most interesting today is what is happening in China... It is watched with extreme interest by Hierarchy, and could still go in many directions, well, or not so well. The changes which have taken place have had traumatic, chaotic effects in China, for example, the great Cultural Revolution. The kind of changes that I am envisaging, which will take place in the five centres at first, will take place without these traumatic effects; in the normal democratic way, by logical legislation and general agreement. All sections of society will take part, which will ensure the adoption of the various changes, whereas in China, and Russia, many of them were imposed. In America and Britain, today, many social changes are opposed by finance rather than by decree, but the result is the same.
Benjamin Creme
