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T Quotes

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All T Quotes

“THE PLAQUE read HARVEY GOULD, P I. It was the middle of the day, but the blinds were closed. Inside a desktop sat flanked by three non-matching chairs, a creased, leather sofa and a bookcase full of fiction. A middle-aged man lay back with a pair of briefs hanging around his ankles. A gorgeous, young lady was bent over him in a pair of pink panties that stretched over her pert buttocks. Her head was bobbing up and down and her long, thick black hair swished around her neck with each bob. Harvey lay motionless, moaning.”

“The plash of water, the sight of her shoes and stockings awry on the path where she had flung them; or Here Boy lapping in the puddle near her feet, and suddenly there was Sweet Home rolling, rolling, rolling out before her eyes, and although there was not a leaf on that farm that did not make her want to scream, it rolled itself out before her in shameless beauty. It never looked as terrible as it was and it made her wonder if hell was a pretty place too. Fire and brimstone all right, but hidden in lacy groves. Boys hanging from the most beautiful sycamores in the world. It shamed her - remembering the wonderful soughing trees rather than the boys. Try as she might to make it otherwise, the sycamores beat out the children every time and she could not forgive memory for that.”

“The plate features seared sea serpent with poached meadow flower breams." The acidic bath method had worked. The flesh of the sea serpent had transformed yet again and changed to a very iron-rich deep red. The taste was reminiscent of fatty tuna, with a stronger metallic edge. I'd set the filets in shallow clay bowls and bathed them in a marinade made of coriander, minced ginger, chilies, kalamansi, and my signature soy sauce. I'd toasted black sesame seeds and combined them with crushed pink peppercorns as a rub--- the crust to create a contrast for the tender, almost jellied meat underneath. On the side, I added the poached filets of meadow flower breams in a rich golden sauce with singing carp caviar.”

“The plate the waiter now set before her looked like an abstract painting: vivid green shot through with bright-coral slashes. "Taste!" he urged. It was clearly a fish but so sweet she did not recognize it. Looking at the color, she hazarded a guess. "Salmon? Or maybe not. It doesn't taste like salmon." Troisgros looked very pleased. "That is because it was caught just this morning in the Allier, our local river. But also because we preserve the color by slicing the fish very thinly and searing it for just a few seconds." "So it's almost raw?" She wasn't sure about this. "In Japan they eat their fish raw." She took another bite; the herbal sauce flirted with bitterness. "The flavor is so green I feel I'm eating color." "Sorrel." He gestured to the waiter, who removed the plates and then set a single small bird surrounded by sliced fruit in front of each of them. "Sarcelle aux abricots," he announced. "Sarcelle?" Stella did not recognize the word. "It's a freshwater duck," said Jules. "I can't remember the word in English." "Teal," Troisgros supplied. Stella closed her eyes and tried describing the flavor. "It tastes wild." She began to dream herself into the dish as if it were a painting, imagining a golden field in the sunshine, feeling the air rush past, hearing the sound of her own wings. Circling in a great joyous arc, she spotted a tree covered in tawny fruits, breathed their perfume in the air. "I wanted---" the chef was watching her--- "to give you the essence of the animal. To let you taste what the duck ate on her flight through life.”

“The Platonists and their Christian successors held the peculiar notion that Earth was tainted and somehow nasty, while the heavens were perfect and divine. The fundamental idea that the Earth is a planet, that we are citizens of the Universe, was rejected and forgotten. This idea was first argued by Aristarchus, born on Samos three centuries after Pythagoras. Aristarchus was one of the last of the Ionian scientists. By this time, the center of intellectual enlightenment had moved to the great Library of Alexandria. Aristarchus was the first person to hold that the Sun rather than the Earth is at the center of the planetary system that all the planets go around the Sun rather than the Earth. Typically, his writings on this matter are the lost. From the size of the Earth's shadow on the Moon during a lunar eclipse, he deduced that the Sun had to be much larger than the Earth, as well as very far away. He may then have reasoned that it is absurd for so large a body as the Sun to revolve around so small a body as the Earth. He put the Sun at the center, made the Earth rotate on its axis once a day or orbit the Sun once a year. It is the same idea we associate with the name of Copernicus, whom Galileo described as the 'restorer and confirmer', not the inventor, of the heliocentric hypothesis. For most of the 1,800 years between Aristarchus and Copernicus nobody knew the correct disposition of the planets, even though it had been laid out perfectly clearly around 280 B.C.”

“The play account rule is that it must be spent every month. That's right! Each month you have to blow all the money in that account in a way that makes you feel rich. For example, imagine walking into a massage center, dumping all the money from your account on the counter, pointing to the massage therapists, and saying, "I want both of you on me. With the hot rocks and the frickin' cucumbers. After that, bring me lunch!"”

“The play was written between 1948 and 1951, in the aftermath of the German occupation of several countries in Europe. The ending of that and the subsequent launching of the United Nations showed that the concept of national freedom was likely to be fundamental in the post-war world. A dramatic treatment of the origins of that concept seemed to me to be well worth attempting. The material was to be found in my native country, for the Scottish Declaration of Independence commonly known as the Declaration of Arbroath, is generally accepted as the earliest document in which the concept of national freedom is carefully defined, and asserted with passionate conviction. It is an early landmark on the road to later documents such as the United States Declaration of Independence, the Atlantic Charter, and the Charter of the United Nations.”