Tangle Quotes
More Tangle Quotes
They'll lead us bit by bit toward the revolutionary idea that we've grown about as powerful as it's wise to grow; that the rush of technological innovation that's marked the last five hundred years can finally slow, and spread out to water the whole delta of human possibility. But those decisions will only emerge if people understand the time for what it is: the moment when we stand precariously on the sharp ridge between the human past and the posthuman future, the moment when meaning might evaporate in a tangle of genes or chips.
bill mckibben— p. 198 (Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age (2003))
Farewell, Love, and all thy laws forever, Thy baited hooks shall tangle me no more.
thomas wyatt— 1557 'Farewell, Love'. Sir Thomas Wyatt
If the cells and fibres in one human brain were all stretched out end to end, they would certainly reach to the moon and back. Yet the fact that they are not arranged end to end enabled man to go there himself. The astonishing tangle within our heads makes us what we are.
— Mechanics of the Mind (1977, Cambridge University Press)
What shall a man say when a friend has vanished behind the doors of Death? A mere tangle of barren words, only words.
robert e. howard— From a letter to Tevis Clyde Smith (c. May 1928)
O early one morning I walked out like Agag,Early one morning to walk through the fireDodging the pythons that leaked on the pavementsWith tinkle of glasses and tangle of wire.
louis macneice— "The Streets of Laredo", line 1, from Holes in the Sky (1948)
— MacNeice’s poem, a grotesque vision of the London Blitz, is not to be confused with the cowboy ballad "The Streets of Laredo".
Thou sorrow, venom Elfe. Is this thy play,To spin a web out of thyselfe To Catch a Fly? For Why?[...]To tangle Adams race In's stratigemsTo their Destructions, spoil'd, made base By venom things Damn'd Sins.
edward taylor— "Upon a Spider Catching a Fly" St. 1 & 8
When a woman plays the fool, look for the man. That was one of Lini's favorites. Another was, Kittens tangle your yarn, men tangle your wits, and it's simple as breathing for both.
robert jordan— Lini (The Path of Daggers (20 October 1998))
A whole tangle of series, possibly including everything Moorcock's written, not excluding his grocery lists, but I'm not sure; certainly includes most of his fantasy. Various subseries are declared complete every so often, as for example in an ad for the Last Elric Book in the current issue of F&SF; such declarations sometimes prove true, but on the other hand, I've seen several previous Last Elric Books.
michael moorcock— Joe Bernstein, Usenet article (2005), describing the Eternal Champion series.
Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking. Live in silence. Flow down and down in always widening rings of being.
jalal al-din muhammad rumi— "A Community of the Spirit" in Ch. 1 : The Tavern, p. 2
In asking forgiveness of women for our mythologizing of their bodies, for being unreal about them, we can only appeal to their own sexuality, which is different but not basically different, perhaps, from our own. For women, too, there seems to be that tangle of supplication and possessiveness, that descent toward infantile undifferentiation, that omnipotent helplessness, that merger with the cosmic mother-warmth, that flushed pulse- quickened leap into overestimation, projection, general mix-up.
john updike— “The Female Body,” Michigan Quarterly Review (1990)
Life is probably a tangle of love and hate permanently knotted together.
gao xingjian— ch. 12, p. 70
The United States is the world 's best hope , but if you fetter her in the interests and quarrels of other nations , if you tangle her in the intrigues of Europe , you will destroy her power for good and endanger her very existence .
— Henry Cabot Lodge, in David Welky America Between the Wars, 1919-1941: A Documentary Reader, John Wiley & Sons, 24 January 2012, p.199
If the cells and fibres in one human brain were all stretched out end to end, they would certainly reach to the moon and back. Yet the fact that they are not arranged end to end enabled man to go there himself. The astonishing tangle within our heads makes us what we are.
— Mechanics of the Mind (1977, Cambridge University Press)
You must lay lime, to tangle her desires By wailful sonnets.
— Proteus, scene ii
