Rainstorm Quotes
In a bull market, one must avoid the error of the preening duck that quacks boastfully after a torrential rainstorm, thinking that its paddling skills have caused it to rise in the world. A right-thinking duck would instead compare its position after the downpour to that of the other ducks on the pond.
Warren Buffett
"The whole of modern so-called civilised existence is an attempt to deny reality insofar as it exists. When did Don last look at the stars, when did Norman last get soaked in a rainstorm? The stars as far as these people are concerned are the Manhattan-pattern!” He jerked his thumb at a window beyond which the city's treasure-house of coloured light glimmered gaudily.
John Brunner
A cloud masses, the sky darkens, leaves twist upward, and we know that it will rain. We also know that after the storm, the runoff will feed into groundwater miles away, and the sky will grow clear by tomorrow. All of these events are distant in time and space, if they're all connected within the same pattern. Each has an influence on the rest, and influence that is usually hidden from view. You can only understand the system of rainstorm by contemplating the whole not any part of the pattern.
Businesses and other human endeavors are also systems. They, too, are bound by invisible fabrics of interrelated actions, which often take years to fully play out their effects on each other. Since we are part of that lacework ourselves, it's doubly hard to see the whole pattern of change. Instead we tend to focus on snapshots of isolated parts of the system, and wonder why our deepest problems never seem to get resolved.
Peter Senge
I can still picture myself riding in the back of a Bronco to a field party after a rainstorm. My mama will kill me for saying this, but my first beer, I was 15 and I didn't know what to do with it. I thought you were supposed to chug it. So I just downed the whole thing in one gulp. All my friends were like, 'Duuuuuuude!
Dave Haywood
It's a tango." Marco maneuvered me out among the dancers. "I love tangos." "I can't dance." "You don't have to dance. I'll do that dancing." Marco hooked an arm around my waist and jerked me up against his dazzling white suit. Then he said, "Pretend you are drowning." I shut my eyes, and the music broke over me like a rainstorm. Marco's leg slid forward against mine and my leg slid back and I seemed to be riveted against him, limb for limb, moving as he moved, without any will or knowledge of my own, and after a while I thought, "It doesn't take two to dance, it only takes one," and I let myself blow and bend like a tree in the wind. "What did I tell you?
Sylvia Plath
Raphus cucullatus had become rare unto death. But this one flesh-and-blood individual still lived. Imagine that she was thirty years old, or thirty-five, an ancient age for most sorts of birds but not impossible for a member of such a large-bodied species. She no longer ran, she waddled... In the dark of an early morning in 1667, say, during a rainstorm, she took cover beneath a cold stone ledge at the base of one of the Black River cliffs. She drew her head down against her body, fluffed her feathers for warmth, squinted in patient misery. She waited. She didn't know it, nor did anyone else, but she was the only dodo on Earth. When the storm passed, she never opened her eyes. This is extinction.
David Quammen
There is one mistake we got to avoid, and that is the mistake of supposing that if you simulate it, you duplicate it. This is a deep mistake embedded in our popular culture - that simulation is equivalent to duplication, but of course it isn't. A perfect simulation of the brain - say, on a computer - would no longer thereby be conscious than a perfect simulation of a rainstorm on a weather-predicting computer will leave us all wet.
John Searle
