But man is not made for defeat

“But man is not made for defeat,” he said. “A man can be destroyed but not defeated.” I am
sorry that I killed the fish though, he thought. Now the bad time is coming and I do not even have
the harpoon. The dentuso is cruel and able and strong and intelligent. But I was more intelligent
than he was. Perhaps not, he thought. Perhaps I was only better armed.
“Don’t think, old man,” he said aloud. “Sail on this course and take it when it comes.

Then when luck comes you are ready

"But, he thought, I keep them with precision. Only I have no luck any more. But who knows?
Maybe today. Every day is a new day. It is better to be lucky. But I would rather be exact. Then
when luck comes you are ready. "

When I see a man with a tidy place...

"The first thing I liked about you," said Lydia, "was that you didn't have a t.v. in your place. My ex-husband looked at t.v.
every night and all through the weekend. We even had to arrange our lovemaking to fit the t.v. schedule."
"Umm. . . ."
"Another thing I liked about your place was that it was filthy. Beer bottles all over the floor. Lots of trash everywhere. Dirty
dishes, and a shit-ring in your toilet, and the crud in your bathtub. All those rusty razorblades laying around the bathroom
sink. I knew that you would eat pussy."
"You judge a man according to his surroundings, right?"
"Right. When I see a man with a tidy place I know there's something wrong with him. And if it's too tidy, he's a fag."

The episodic century

"the last 50 years of the previous century. Why? We live in an age of rapid-fire change because over the past 200 years the comparatively straightforward Industrial Revolution has morphed into an era of nonlinear change punctuated with tipping points. The machinery of the current century is a collection of interconnected complex, rather than smooth-running, systems. Gradual and linear change no longer happens. Instead, ‘‘progress’’ moves in bursts—fits-and-starts marked by waves of unimaginable flashes, sparks, booms, bubbles, shocks, extremes, bombs, and leaps. Half probabilistic and half nonlinear deterministic, the twenty-first century is defined by intersecting long-tailed distributions, rather than independent and isolated Normal distributions. Episodic phenomena behave erratically and have no average or expected values."

If our Sun were suddenly squeezed down to a point

"If our Sun, which is nearly 900,000 miles (1.4 million kilometers) wide, were suddenly squeezed down to a point, its magic sphere would be less than 4 miles (6 kilometers) across. But the Earth, perched some 93 million miles (150 million kilometers) away, would not be affected at all. Indeed, all the planets would still orbit around the Sun in the same way they have for some four billion years if the Sun were that size. Although the Sun’s mass is more condensed, it exerts the same gravitational pull on us. It is only closer in that the gravitational pull of the magical sphere starts to soar."

Gravity and acceleration are equivalent

"Einstein first recognized that the force we feel upon a uniform acceleration and the force we feel when under the control of gravity are one and the same. In the jargon of physics, gravity and a constant acceleration are “equivalent.” There is no difference between being pulled down on the Earth by gravity or being pulled backward in an accelerating car. To arrive at this conclusion, Einstein imagined a windowless room far out in space, magically accelerating upward, moving faster and faster with each passing second. Anyone in that room would find their feet pressed against the floor. In fact, without windows to serve as a check, you couldn’t be sure you were in space. From the feel of your weight, you could as easily be standing quietly in a room on Earth. Both the magical, accelerating space elevator and the Earth, with its gravitational field keeping you in place, are equivalent systems. Einstein reasoned that the fact that the laws of physics predict exactly the same behavior for objects in the accelerating room and in Earth’s gravitational hold means that gravity and acceleration are, in some fashion, the same thing."