Cada uno de nosotros es, sucesivamente, no uno, sino muchos. Y estas personalidades sucesivas, que emergen las unas de las otras, suelen ofrecer entre si los más raros y asombrosos contrastes.

Motivos de Proteo (José Enrique Rodó, 1909)

Las películas sonoras nunca me gustaron. Las películas mudas iban bien encaminadas para convertirse en una nueva forma de arte.

Lillian Gish dixit

¿Las películas sonoras? ¡Cómo las odio! Serán la ruina del arte más antiguo del mundo, el de la pantomima. Destruyen la gran belleza del silencio

Charles Chaplin dixit

Quan aquests aparells es mostrin en públic, quan tothom pugui fotografiar el seus éssers més estimats, no ja en la seva forma immòbil, sinó en el seu moviment, en la seva acció, en els seus gestos familiars, amb la paraula a punt de sortir dels llavis, la mort deixarà de ser absoluta.

Germans Lumière dixit (La Poste, 29 de desembre de 1895)

El terror més gran que pot patir un nen és no sentir-se estimat, i el rebuig constitueix per a ell un veritable infern. Crec que tothom, d'una manera o d'una altra, ha experimentat aquesta sensació. I amb ella ve la ira, i després de la ira el crim, sigui quin sigui, com a venjança per l'abandonament, i després del crim la culpa; aquesta és la història de la humanitat. Jo crec que si aquesta sensació d'abandonament pogués ser amputada, els homes serien el que són.

A l'est de l'Edèn

(John Steinbeck, 1952, al llibret de l'obra La Pols de Llàtzer Garcia)

Puede que la señal del primer eco del Big Bang no signifique nada después de todo.

Robert Wilson dixit (Materia)

Es sorprendente pensar que los fotones del Big Bang siguen llegando hasta nuestro cuerpo sin que seamos conscientes de ello.

Robert Wilson dixit (Materia)

El fútbol es la cosa más seria que hay en España ahora mismo.

Jose María Carrascal dixit (A vivir que son dos días, La Ser)

Trobar parella en ciclisme és tan difícil o més que trobar parella a la vida, per això es veuen tants ciclistes sols rodant per la carretera, més que individus a peu. 

Joan Miquel Oliver (Després d'Antònia Font.

Vindran mesos amb erra, El Núvol)

Pues es una oveja espantosa como las demás; pero, como es Dolly, te hace más ilusión.

Anna Veiga dixit (Aunque se quisiera,  es imposible

clonar a la misma persona, El País Semanal)

The crucial difference, though, is that there are vaccines for biological weapons, while there are no vaccines for explosives.

[...] for every terrorist trying to engineer a biological weapon there are a thousand researchers working on a cure.

 

The ghost map [251/299]

(Steven Johnson, 2006, Penguin Books)

If this scenario come to pass, the pandemic threat will ultimately be defeated by a different kind of map - not maps of lives and deaths on a city street, or bird flu outbreaks, but maps of nucleotides wrapped in a double helix. Our hability to analyze the genetic composition of any life-form has made astonishing progress over the past ten years, but in many ways we are at the very beginning of the genomic revolution.

The ghost map [249/299]

(Steven Johnson, 2006, Penguin Books)

This is the world that Snow and Whitehead helped make possible: a planet of cities.

The ghost map [234/299]

(Steven Johnson, 2006, Penguin Books)

Snow himself was a kind of a one-man coffeehouse: one of the primary reasons he was able to cut through the fog of miasma was his multidisciplinary approach, as a practicing physician, mapmaker, inventor, chemist, demographer, and medical detective.

The ghost map [226/299]

(Steven Johnson, 2006, Penguin Books)

All the local knowledge that so often remains trapped in the minds of the neighborhood residents can now be translated into map form and shared with the rest of the world. As in 1854, the amateurs are producing the most interesting work, precisely because they most textured, granular experience of their community. [...] The may map the intangibles.

The ghost map [219-220/299]

(Steven Johnson, 2006, Penguin Books)

The technology has advanced dramatically, but the underlying philosophy remains the same: that there is something profoundly enlightening about seeing these patterns of life and death laid out in cartographic form. The bird's-eye view remains as essential as ti was back in 1854. When the next great epidemic does come, maps will be as crucial as vaccines in our fight agains the disease. But again, the scale of the observation will have broadened considerably: from a neighborhood to an entire planet.

The ghost map [219/299]

(Steven Johnson, 2006, Penguin Books)

If Snow and Whitehead's Broad Street investigation showed that urban intelligence could come to understand a massive health crisis, Bazalgette's sewers proved that you could actually do something about it.

[...]

The great killer of the nineteenth-century metropolis had been tamed by a combination of science, medicine, and engineering.

The ghost map [207,215/299]

(Steven Johnson, 2006, Penguin Books)

"Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending".

George Eliot

The ghost map [167/299]

(Steven Johnson, 2006, Penguin Books)

It marks a turning point in the battle between urban man and Vibrio cholerae, because for the first time a public institution had made an informed intervention into a cholera outbreak based on a scientifically sound theory of the disease. The decision to remove the handle was not based on meteorological charts or social prejudice or watered-down medieval humorology; it was based on a methodological survey of the actual social patterns of the epidemic, confirming predictions put forward by an underlying theory of the disease's effect on the human body. It was based on information that the city's own organization had made visible. For the first time, the V. cholerae's growing dominion over the city would be challenged by reason, not superstition.

The ghost map [162-163/299]

(Steven Johnson, 2006, Penguin Books)

History has its epic thresholds where the world is transformed in a matter of minutes.

The ghost map [162/299]

(Steven Johnson, 2006, Penguin Books)

Miasma was the intellectual equivalent of a contagious disease; it had spread through the intelligentsia with an alarming infection rate.

The ghost map [144/299]

(Steven Johnson, 2006, Penguin Books)

What he needed now were aberrations, deviations from the norm. Pockets of life where you would expect death, pockets of death where you would expect life.

The ghost map [140/299]

(Steven Johnson, 2006, Penguin Books)

[...] seeing the patterns more clearly means progress, in the long run at least.

The ghost map [135/299]

(Steven Johnson, 2006, Penguin Books)

[...] methane and putrescine and cadaverine are the smoke. Microbes are the fire.

[...] They mistook the smoke for the fire.

The ghost map [130-131/299]

(Steven Johnson, 2006, Penguin Books)

All of which begs the central question: Why was the miasma theory so persuasive? Why did so many brilliant minds cling to it, despite the mounting evidence that suggested it false? This kind of question leads one to a kind of mirror-image version of intellectual history: not the history of breakthroughs and eureka moments, but instead the history of canards and false leads, the history of being wrong. Whenever smart people cling to an outlandishly incorrect idea despite substantial evidence to the contrary, something interesting is at work.

The ghost map [126/299]

(Steven Johnson, 2006, Penguin Books)

The Victorians were literally flushing money down the toilet.

The ghost map [116/299]

(Steven Johnson, 2006, Penguin Books)

"Whilst pestilence slays its thousands, fear slays its tens of thousands".

The ghost map [84/299]

(Steven Johnson, 2006, Penguin Books)

Dying of dehydration is, in a sense, an abomination against the very origins of life on earth.

The ghost map [38/299]

(Steven Johnson, 2006, Penguin Books)

[...] it's been one long Age of Bacteria on this planet since the days of the primordial soup. The rest of us are mere afterthoughts.

The ghost map [36/299]

(Steven Johnson, 2006, Penguin Books)

Once you began emitting rice-water stools, odds were you'd be dead in a matter of hours.

The ghost map [34/299]

(Steven Johnson, 2006, Penguin Books)

Imagine if every time you experienced a slight upset stomach you knew that there was an entirely reasonable chance you'd be dead in forty-eigh hours.

The ghost map [32-33/299]

(Steven Johnson, 2006, Penguin Books)

There is no document of civilization that is not also a document of barbarism.

Walter Benjamin

The ghost map [14/299]

(Steven Johnson, 2006, Penguin Books)

[in medieval times] the collecting of human excrements was a venerable occupation.

The ghost map [8/299]

(Steven Johnson, 2006, Penguin Books)

But if the bacteria disappeared overnight, all life on the planet would be stinguished within a matter of years.

The ghost map [7/299]

(Steven Johnson, 2006, Penguin Books)

Waste recycling turns out to be a hallmark of almost all complex systems [...]

The ghost map [6/299]

(Steven Johnson, 2006, Penguin Books)

In his inaugural professorial lecture at Cambridge, William Bateson, one of the fathers of Mendelian genetics, admonished students of the new science:

 If I may throw out a word of counsel to beginners, it is: Treasure your exceptions! … Keep them always uncovered and in sight. Exceptions are like the rough brickwork of a growing building which tells that there is more to come and shows where the next construction is to be. (Bateson, 1908) 

William Bateson dixit (H.G. Spencer & J.B. Wolf, 

Genomic imprinting: theories and data, Heredity, 2014)

- Denis Thatcher: You can rewind it, but you can’t change it.

Iron Lady (2011)

- Can she [Margaret Thatcher] also accept that her free market economics designed to create a growing middle class ensures that the rich get richer and the poor are irrelevant! 

Iron Lady (2011)

El que escribe un diario en su casa y lo guarda en un cajón, lo escribe también para ser leído. [...] Lo escribes a veces hasta para ser leído por ti mismo cuando tú ya no eres el que eras.

David Trueba dixit (Vivir es fácil con los ojos cerrados, Cadena Ser)

Our society needs criminals like Wolfgang Priklopil in order to give a face to the evil that lives within and to split it off from society itself. It needs the images of cellar dungeons so as not ot have to see the many homes in which violence rears its conformist, bourgeois head. Society uses the victims of sensational cases such as mine in order to divest itself of the responsibility for the many nameless victims of daily crimes, victims nobody helps - even when they ask for help.

3096 days [162/240]
(Natascha Kampusch, 2010, Penguin books)

The fish does not jump over the edge of the glass bowl where only death awaits.

3096 days [127/240]
(Natascha Kampusch, 2010, Penguin books)

Gratitude

 

Take nothing for granted. Even a rock will eventually surrender to the sea and love can slip away like sand through fingers

Michael Faudet

Yo no estoy haciendo una carrera estratégica, yo estoy viviendo.

Sergi López dixit ("Cómo es posible que el votante del

Frente Nacional sea inmigrante", eldiario.es)

"Por muy brillante que sea la hipótesis enunciada por un físico, no valdrá nada si no recibe una comprobación experimental"

Antonio Muñoz Molina (Fiebre de Saber, El País)

“Es increíble, pero las leyes que explican el universo caben en una hoja de papel”

Savas Dimopoulos dixit (Fiebre de Saber, Antonio Muñoz Molina, El País)

- FAQ: Can I email you?
- Ursula K. Le Guin: Please don’t.

 Ursula K. Le Guin FAQ

I just hope I don't get a bad dementia. As long as I can play credible tennis I think I belong in science. When I can't exercise I think my brain will go as well.

James Watson dixit (James Watson: thinking outside the genome, 

The Lancet, March 2014)

James Watson has become what you would call a theoretical biologist now. He spends his time trying to make connections in different areas of biology.

Professor David Tuvenson dixit
(James Watson: thinking outside the genome, The Lancet, March 2014)

I come into my office 7 days a week because I like science.

James Watson dixit (James Watson: thinking outside the genome, 

The Lancet, March 2014)

I think that new ideas come from knowing more than other people. I've been a voracious reader all my life. I'm constantly filling my brain with half memories of things I think might be important.

James Watson dixit (James Watson: thinking outside the genome, 

The Lancet, March 2014)

El sonido de la ausencia de Ryu.

Mapa de los sonidos de Tokio [64/116]
(Isabel Coixet, 2009, Tusquets Editores)

Un espeso silencio se instaló entre nosotros. El sonido del silencio que se instala entre dos personas: una que ama y otra que no sabe que es amada. El silencio más triste del mundo.

Mapa de los sonidos de Tokio [64/116]
(Isabel Coixet, 2009, Tusquets Editores)

Lágrimas tan saladas que escuecen antes de salir.

Mapa de los sonidos de Tokio [35/116]
(Isabel Coixet, 2009, Tusquets Editores)

Ella no pestañea. Casi nunca pestañea.

Mapa de los sonidos de Tokio [27/116]
(Isabel Coixet, 2009, Tusquets Editores)

La clase de sonrisa dulce que una chica guarda para aquellos hombres con los que jamás piensa en acostarse.

Mapa de los sonidos de Tokio [22/116]
(Isabel Coixet, 2009, Tusquets Editores)

Le dije que me gustaba el sonido que hacía al sorber su sopa, que me recordaba al sonido que hacía mi madre.

Mapa de los sonidos de Tokio [21/116]
(Isabel Coixet, 2009, Tusquets Editores)

Perquè el paisatge sigui present, ha d'estar limitat, dimensionat per una decisió radical: tapar els horitzons en aixecar les parets i descobrir-los només en punts estratègics mitjançant obertures.

Le Corbusier dixit

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

Worstward Ho (Samuel Beckett)

Fail Better in Science Gallery

Cierta escritura de ficción es la escritura que hace que la realidad sea lo que es.

Bernardo Luís Munuera

(Los angostos esfínteres del dinero, La manía de leer)