e pur si muove

The first time you do something, it’s science. The second time, it’s engineering. A third time - it’s just being a technician.

- Clifford Stoll

Telling these truths is your job. You have nothing else to tell us. But needless to say, you can’t tell them in a sentence or a paragraph; the truth doesn’t come out in bumper stickers. There may be a flickering moment of insight in a one-liner, in a sound bite, but everyday meat-and-potato truth is beyond our ability to capture in a few words. Your whole piece is the truth, not just one shining epigrammatic moment in it. There will need to be some kind of unfolding in order to contain it, and there will need to be layers. We are dealing with the ineffable here - we’re out there somewhere between the known and the unknown, trying to reel in both for a closer look. This is why it may take a whole book.

Anne Lamont, Bird by bird: some instructions on writing and life, pp 103-4

The Gulf Stream will flow through a straw provided the straw is aligned to the Gulf Stream, and not at cross purposes with it. - Ann Lamont, Bird by Bird, p 121

A labmate and I were discussing classical liberalism in lab today when he mentioned reading a collection of Jefferson’s papers. I was browsing through it and found these two awesome, if somewhat less well-known, quoteworthy gems:

What a cruel reflection, that a rich country cannot long be a free one. - Travel Notes (Mar 1788)

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be. - To Charles Yancy, Monticello, Jan 6 1816