Membranes Quotes

• Life needs a membrane to contain itself so it can replicate and mutate.

  Frans Lanting

  Needs, Replicate

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• Most creatures have a vague belief that a very precarious hazard, a kind of transparent membrane, divides death from love; and that the profound idea of nature demands that the giver of life should die at the moment of giving.

  Maurice Maeterlinck

  Sex, Ideas, Giving

  Maurice Maeterlinck (2015). “The Life of the Bee: Works of Maeterlinck”, p.97, 谷月社

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• A cell is a complex structure, with its investing membrane, nucleus, and nucleolus.

  Charles Darwin

  Cells, Investing, Nucleus

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• Skin has become inadequate in interfacing with reality. Technology has become the body's new membrane of existence.

  Nam June Paik

  Technology, Reality, Skins

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• ... on these expanded membranes [butterfly wings] Nature writes, as on a tablet, the story of the modifications of species, so truly do all changes of the organisation register themselves thereon. Moreover, the same colour-patterns of the wings generally show, with great regularity, the degrees of blood-relationship of the species. As the laws of nature must be the same for all beings, the conclusions furnished by this group of insects must be applicable to the whole world.

  Henry Walter Bates

  Nature, Writing, Butterfly

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• I swim in a sea of words. They flow around me and through me and, by a process that is not fully clear to me, some delicate hidden membrane draws forth the stuff that is the necessary condition of my life.

  Geraldine Brooks

  Art, Motivation, Sea

  "A Home in Fiction". Boyer Lectures 2011: "The Idea of Home", Lecture 4, www.abc.net.au. December 11, 2011.

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• Known as the biosphere to scientists and as the creation to theologians, all of life together consists of a membrane around earth so thin that it cannot be seen edgewise from a satellite yet so prodigiously diverse that only a tiny fraction of species have been discovered and named.

  E. O. Wilson

  Science, Discovery, Diversity

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• We fear discovering that we are more than we think we are. More than our parents/children/teachers think we are. We fear that we actually possess the talent that our still, small voice tells us. That we actually have the guts, the perseverance, the capacity. We fear that we truly can steer our ship, plant our flag, reach our Promised Land. We fear this because, if it’s true, then we become estranged from all we know. We pass through a membrane. We become monsters and monstrous.

  Steven Pressfield

  Perseverance, Teacher, Fear

  Steven Pressfield (2002). “The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles”, p.143, Black Irish Entertainment LLC

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• What is the universe? The universe is a symphony of vibrating strings...we are nothing but melodies. We are nothing but cosmic music played out on vibrating strings and membranes.

  Michio Kaku

  Symphony, Strings, Cosmic

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• Living, as I do, in an educated and scientific atmosphere, I could not have conceived that the first principles of zoology were so little known. Is it possible that you do not know the elementary fact in comparative anatomy, that the wing of a bird is really the forearm, while the wing of a bat consists of three elongated fingers with membranes between?

  Arthur Conan Doyle

  Humorous, Sarcasm, Wings

  Arthur Conan Doyle (1995). “The Lost World and Other Stories”, p.27, Wordsworth Editions

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• You must not sneeze. If you have a vehement cold you must take no notice of it; if your nose membranes feel a great irritation you must hold your breath; if a sneeze still insists upon making its way you must oppose it keeping your teeth grinding together; if the violence of the pulse breaks some blood-vessel you must break the blood-vessel -- but not sneeze.

  Fanny Burney

  Blood, Irritation, Together

  Fanny Burney (2013). “Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay: Volume 2: Edited by Her Niece”, p.346, Cambridge University Press

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• Viewed from the distance of the moon, the astonishing thing about the earth, catching the breath, is that it is alive. The photographs show the dry, pounded surface of the moon in the foreground, dry as an old bone. Aloft, floating free beneath the moist, gleaming, membrane of bright blue sky, is the rising earth, the only exuberant thing in this part of the cosmos.

  Lewis Thomas

  Distance, Moon, Blue

  Lewis Thomas (1990). “A Long Line of Cells Collected Essays”

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• I've always felt that there's a very thin membrane between madness and alcoholism, and/or destitution and being an OK American guy in a comfortable heated apartment with meatballs and a decent Sauvignon Blanc in the fridge.

  August Kleinzahler

  Guy, Madness, Meatballs

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• Death, however, does itch. It itches all the time. It is always with us, scratching at some inner door. Mirroring, softly, barely audibly, just under the membrane of consciousness. Hidden in disguise, leaking out in a variety of symptoms. It is the wellspring of many of our worries, stresses, and conflicts.

  Irvin D. Yalom

  Death, Stress, Doors

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• All morning I struggled with the sensation of stray wisps of one world seeping through the cracks of another. Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you? You leave the previous book with ideas and themes -- characters even -- caught in the fibers of your clothes, and when you open the new book, they are still with you.

  Diane Setterfield

  Morning, Book, Reading

  Diane Setterfield (2007). “The Thirteenth Tale: A Novel”, p.289, Simon and Schuster

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• The vestibule door opens onto a June morning so fine and scrubbed Classira pauses at the threshold as she would at the edge of a pool, watching the turquoise water lapping at the tiles, the liquid nets of sun wavering in the blue depths. As if standing at the edge of a pool she delays for a moment the plunge, the quick membrane of chill, the plain shock of immersion.

  Michael Cunningham

  Morning, June, Blue

  Michael Cunningham (1998). “The Hours: A Novel”, p.9, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux

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• In the study of this membrane [the retina] I for the first time felt my faith in Darwinism (hypothesis of natural selection) weakened, being amazed and confounded by the supreme constructive ingenuity revealed not only in the retina and in the dioptric apparatus of the vertebrates but even in the meanest insect eye. ... I felt more profoundly than in any other subject of study the shuddering sensation of the unfathomable mystery of life.

  Santiago Ramon y Cajal

  Eye, Science, Research

  Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1989). “Recollections of My Life”, p.576, MIT Press

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• The membrane between where we are right now and a very different reality, is so much thinner than we like to think. Things can go back, and things can go to the side, and things can go to places where we might not even have been on guard that they might go. I think that if there is a great gift that this [Donald Trump] election gave us, is this sort of sense of vigilance, the sense that we have to remain on guard. We have to support our free press.

  Ben H. Winters

  Reality, Thinking, Support

  Source: www.slate.com

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• The ocean is a place of skin, rich outer membranes hiding thick juicy insides, laden with the soup of being.

  Vera Nazarian

  Ocean, Sea, Skins

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• I believe that mycelium is the neurological network of nature. Interlacing mosaics of mycelium infuse habitats with information-sharing membranes. These membranes are aware, react to change, and collectively have the long-term health of the host environment in mind. The mycelium stays in constant molecular communication with its environment, devising diverse enzymatic and chemical responses to complex challenges.

  Paul Stamets

  Nature, Believe, Communication

  Paul Stamets (2011). “Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World”, p.21, Ten Speed Press

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• Chronic sexual predators [to Vachss, pedophiles] have crossed an osmotic membrane. They can’t step back to the other side - our side. And they don't want to. If we don't kill them or release them, we have but one choice. Call them monsters and isolate them.... I’ve spoken to many predators over the years. They always exhibit amazement that we do not hunt them. And that when we capture them, we eventually let them go. Our attitude is a deliberate interference with Darwinism - an endangerment of our species.

  Andrew Vachss

  Attitude, Years, Choices

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• I'm floating inside my skin. I could go on floating like this for days. Right now, the real world with its heartbreak and disappointments is just a pulse against the protective membrane we've drunk ourselves into. It's somewhere outside us, waiting." A Great and Terrible Beauty, Page 141, by

  Libba Bray

  Disappointment, Real, Drunk

  Libba Bray (2015). “The Gemma Doyle Trilogy”, p.126, Delacorte Press

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• The aim of my writing is to utterly remove the distance between author and reader so that the book becomes a sort of semipermeable membrane through which feelings, ideas, nutrients pass.

  Erica Jong

  Distance, Book, Writing

  FaceBook post by Erica Jong from Sep 18, 2012

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• The distinguishing of the strata, or layers, in the embryonic membrane was a turning-point in the study of the history of evolution, and placed later researches in their proper light. A division of the (disc-shaped) embryo into an animal and a plastic part first takes place. In the lower part (the plastic or vegetative layer) are a serous and a vascular layer, each of peculiar organization. In the upper part also (the animal or serous germ-layer) two layers are clearly distinguishable, a flesh-layer and a skin-layer. (1828)

  Karl Ernst von Baer

  Animal, Light, Organization

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• She stands and moves within the invisible pentacle of her own virginity. She is an unbroken egg: she is a sealed vessel; she has inside her a magic space the entrance to which is shut tight with a plug of membrane; she is a closed system; she does not know how to shiver.

  Angela Carter

  Moving, Eggs, Space

  Angela Carter (1997). “Burning your boats: the collected short stories”, Penguin Group USA

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